Exploiting Small Leakages in Masks to Turn a Second-Order Attack into a First-Order Attack and Improved Rotating Substitution Box Masking with Linear Code Cosets. (28th September 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: DeTrano, Alexander; Karimi, Naghmeh; Karri, Ramesh; Guo, Xiaofei; Carlet, Claude; Guilley, Sylvain
• Other Names: Nagata Makoto Academic Editor.
• Is Part Of: TheScientificWorldjournal. Volume 2015(2015)
• Publication Date: 2015-09-28
• Subjects: Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals; Medicine -- Periodicals; 505
• DOI: 10.1155/2015/743618
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2356-6140

Abstract

Abstract : Masking countermeasures, used to thwart side-channel attacks, have been shown to be vulnerable to mask-extraction attacks. State-of-the-art mask-extraction attacks on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm target S-Box recomputation schemes but have not been applied to scenarios where S-Boxes are precomputed offline. We propose an attack targeting precomputed S-Boxes stored in nonvolatile memory. Our attack targets AES implemented in software protected by a low entropy masking scheme and recovers the masks with 91% success rate. Recovering the secret key requires fewer power traces (in fact, by at least two orders of magnitude) compared to a classical second-order attack. Moreover, we show that this attack remains viable in a noisy environment or with a reduced number of leakage points. Eventually, we specify a method to enhance the countermeasure by selecting a suitable coset of the masks set.