Paper 2008/005

Information Theoretic Evaluation of Side-Channel Resistant Logic Styles

Francois Mace, Francois-Xavier Standaert, and Jean-Jacques Quisquater

Abstract

We propose to apply an information theoretic metric to the evaluation of side-channel resistant logic styles. Due to the long design and development time required for the physical evaluation of such hardware countermeasures, our analysis is based on simulations. Although they do not aim to replace the need of actual measurements, we show that simulations can be used as a meaningful first step in the validation chain of a cryptographic product. For illustration purposes, we apply our methodology to gate-level simulations of different logic styles and stress that it allows a significant improvement of the previously considered evaluation methods. In particular, our results allow putting forward the respective strengths and weaknesses of actual countermeasures and determining to which extent they can practically lead to secure implementations (with respect to a noise parameter), if adversaries were provided with simulation-based side-channel traces. Most importantly, the proposed methodology can be straightforwardly adapted to adversaries provided with any other kind of leakage traces (including physical ones).

Note: More details are available on: http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/~fstandae/tsca/