A Unified Framework for the Analysis of Side-Channel Key Recovery Attacks

The fair evaluation and comparison of side-channel attacks and countermeasures has been a long standing open question, limiting further developments in the field. Motivated by this challenge, this work makes a step in this direction and proposes a framework for the analysis of cryptographic implementations that includes a theoretical model and an application methodology. The model is based on commonly accepted hypotheses about side-channels that computations give rise to. It allows quantifying the effect of practically relevant leakage functions with a combination of information theoretic and security metrics, measuring the quality of an implementation and the strength of an adversary, respectively. From a theoretical point of view, we demonstrate formal connections between these metrics and discuss their intuitive meaning. From a practical point of view, the model implies a unified methodology for the analysis of side-channel key recovery attacks. The proposed solution allows getting ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EUROCRYPT
• Authors: François-Xavier Standaert, Moti Yung, Tal Malkin
• Keywords: Cryptography, EUROCRYPT 2009, Side-channel Adversaries, Side-channel Attacks, Side-channel Key Recovery