Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2010/408

Improved Trace-Driven Cache-Collision Attacks against Embedded AES Implementations

Jean-François Gallais and Ilya Kizhvatov and Michael Tunstall

Abstract: In this paper we present two attacks that exploit cache events, which are visible in some side channel, to derive a secret key used in an implementation of AES. The first is an improvement of an adaptive chosen plaintext attack presented at ACISP 2006. The second is a new known plaintext attack that can recover a 128-bit key with approximately 30 measurements to reduce the number of key hypotheses to 2^30. This is comparable to classical Dierential Power Analysis; however, our attacks are able to overcome certain masking techniques. We also show how to deal with unreliable cache event detection in the real-life measurement scenario and present practical explorations on a 32-bit ARM microprocessor.

Category / Keywords: implementation / Side channel attacks, power analysis, cache attacks, AES

Publication Info: An extended abstract of this paper will appear at WISA 2010. This is the full version.

Date: received 21 Jul 2010, last revised 23 Sep 2010

Contact author: jean-francois gallais at uni lu

Available formats: PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20100923:143436 (All versions of this report)

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion