Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2005/340

A New Approach to Counteract DPA Attacks on Block Ciphers

Christophe Giraud and Emmanuel Prouff

Abstract: Since the publication of Differential Power Analysis (DPA) in 1998, many countermeasures have been published to counteract this very efficient kind of attacks. All these countermeasures follow the same approach : they try to make sensitive operations uncorrelated with the input. Such a method is very costly in terms of both timing and memory space. In this paper, we suggest a new approach where block ciphers are designed to inherently thwart DPA attacks. The idea we develop in this paper is based on a theoretical analysis of DPA attacks and it essentially consists in embedding existing iterated block ciphers in a secure layer. We analyse the security of our proposal and we show that it induces very small overheads.

Category / Keywords: Countermeasure, Power Analysis, Block ciphers, Smart cards, S-boxes.

Date: received 19 Sep 2005, last revised 27 Sep 2005, withdrawn 19 Oct 2005

Contact author: c giraud at oberthurcs com

Available formats: (-- withdrawn --)

Version: 20051019:115831 (All versions of this report)

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