You Cannot Hide behind the Mask: Power Analysis on a Provably Secure S-Box Implementation

Power analysis has shown to be successful in breaking symmetric cryptographic algorithms implemented on low resource devices. Prompted by the breaking of many protected implementations in practice, researchers saw the need of validating security of implementations with formal methods. Three generic Sbox implementation methods have been proposed by Prouff and Rivain el al., together with formal proofs of their security against 1st or 2nd-order side-channel analysis. These methods use a similar combination of masking and hiding countermeasures. In this paper, we show that although proven resistant to standard power analysis, these implementation methods are vulnerable to a more sophisticated form of power analysis that combines Differential Power Analysis (DPA) and pattern matching techniques. This new form of power analysis is possible under the same assumptions about power leakage as standard DPA attacks and the added complexity is limited: our experiments show that 900 traces are su...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WISA
• Authors: J. Pan, J. I. den Hartog, Jiqiang Lu
• Keywords: Implementation Methods, Power Analysis, Security Privacy, Side-Channel Analysis, WISA 2009