Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2010/297

Correlation-Enhanced Power Analysis Collision Attack

Amir Moradi and Oliver Mischke and Thomas Eisenbarth

Abstract: Side-channel based collision attacks are a mostly disregarded alternative to DPA for analyzing unprotected implementations. The advent of strong countermeasures, such as masking, has made further research in collision attacks seemingly in vain. In this work, we show that the principles of collision attacks can be adapted to efficiently break some masked hardware implementation of the AES which still have first-order leakage. The proposed attack breaks an AES implementation based on the corrected version of the masked S-box of Canright and Batina presented at ACNS 2008 which is supposed to be resistant against firstorder attacks. It requires only six times the number of traces necessary for breaking a comparable unprotected implementation. At the same time, the presented attack has minimal requirements on the abilities and knowledge of an adversary. The attack requires no detailed knowledge about the design, nor does it require a training phase.

Category / Keywords: implementation / Side Channel Analysis, Collision Attack, DPA, Masking, AES, Hardware Implementation

Publication Info: CHES 2010

Date: received 18 May 2010, last revised 28 Jul 2010

Contact author: moradi at crypto rub de

Available formats: PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20100729:054031 (All versions of this report)

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