Protecting Circuits from Leakage: the Computationally-Bounded and Noisy Cases

Abstract. Physical computational devices leak side-channel information that may, and often does, reveal secret internal states. We present a general transformation that compiles any circuit into a new, functionally equivalent circuit which is resilient against well-defined classes of leakage. Our construction requires a small, stateless and computation-independent leak-proof component that draws random elements from a fixed distribution. In essence, we reduce the problem of shielding arbitrarily complex circuits to the problem of shielding a single, simple component. Our approach is based on modeling the adversary as a powerful observer that inspects the device via a limited measurement apparatus. We allow the apparatus to access all the bits of the computation (except those inside the leak-proof component) and the amount of leaked information to grow unbounded over time. However, we assume that the apparatus is limited either in its computational ability (namely, it lacks the abilit...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: EUROCRYPT
• Authors: Sebastian Faust, Tal Rabin, Leonid Reyzin, Eran Tromer, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
• Keywords: Constant Depth Circuit, Cryptology, EUROCRYPT 2010, Leak-proof Component, Measurement Apparatus