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

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-Bo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Alexander DeTrano, Naghmeh Karimi, Ramesh Karri, Xiaofei Guo, Claude Carlet, Sylvain Guilley
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2015-01-01
Series:The Scientific World Journal
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/743618
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2356-6140
1537-744X