Correlation-Enhanced Power Analysis Collision Attack

Abstract

Side-channel based collision attacks are a mostly disregarded alternative to DPA for analyzing unprotected implementations. The advent of strong countermeasures, such as masking, has made further research in collision attacks seemingly in vain. In this work, we show that the principles of collision attacks can be adapted to efficiently break some masked hardware implementation of the AES which still have first-order leakage. The proposed attack breaks an AES implementation based on the corrected version of the masked S-box of Canright and Batina presented at ACNS 2008. The attack requires only six times the number of traces necessary for breaking a comparable unprotected implementation. At the same time, the presented attack has minimal requirements on the abilities and knowledge of an adversary. The attack requires no detailed knowledge about the design, nor does it require a profiling phase.

Detecting Hidden Leakages

“…Examining the First-Order Leakage Back to the original correlation-collision attack [29], which is shortly restated later, the authors proposed a variance test approach which can identify the time instances when a first-order leakage is exhibited by the traces. It is worth to mention that relatively-similar approaches were previously introduced in [1,42] as inter cluster separation and variance test.…”

“…According to [29] a variance trace over the mean traces, e.g., v j∈{0,...,15} = Var(m i j ; ∀ i) should indicate the time samples in which the mean traces depend on the plaintext byte, i.e., j. For example, Fig.…”

“…Realization of masking in hardware platforms faces many challenges due to the uncontrolled glitches happening inside the masked circuits. Since these issues are out of scope of this article, the interested reader is referred to [26,29,32,38]. Although there exist a couple of different masking techniques, the focus of this work is on Boolean masking for software-based platforms, where the challenges are mainly due to their significant overhead.…”

Horizontal Collision Correlation Attack on Elliptic Curves

“…Such attacks require the use of a statistical tool, also known as a distinguisher, together with a leakage model to compare hypotheses with real traces (each one related to known or chosen inputs). The latter constraint may however be relaxed thanks to the so-called collision attacks [32] which aim at detecting the occurrences of colliding values during a computation, that can be linked to the secret [8,14,30,31]. In order to counteract all those attacks, randomization techniques can be implemented (e.g.…”

On the Power of Fault Sensitivity Analysis and Collision Side-Channel Attacks in a Combined Setting

“…Another contribution to CHES 2010 was a collision attack enhanced by correlation [15]. Compared to classical power analysis attacks, its main feature is that it does not rely on the knowledge of an underlying (hypothetical) power model.…”