Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2010/590

Beyond the Limits of DPA: Combined Side-Channel Collision Attacks

Andrey Bogdanov and Ilya Kizhvatov

Abstract: The fundamental problem of extracting the highest possible amount of key-related information using the lowest possible number of measurements is central to side-channel attacks against embedded implementations of cryptographic algorithms. To address it, this work proposes a novel framework enhancing side-channel collision attacks with divide-and-conquer attacks such as differential power analysis (DPA). An information-theoretical metric is introduced for the evaluation of collision detection efficiency. Improved methods of dimension reduction for side-channel traces are developed based on a statistical model of Euclidean distance.

The theoretical and experimental results of this work confirm that DPA-combined collision attacks are superior to both DPA-only and collision-only attacks. The new methods of dimension reduction lead to further complexity improvements. All attacks are treated for the case of AES-128 and are practically validated on a wide-spread 8-bit RISC microcontroller whose architecture is similar to that of many smart cards.

Category / Keywords: side-channel attacks, combined collision attacks, linear collision attacks, DPA, AES

Date: received 19 Nov 2010, last revised 10 May 2011

Contact author: andrey bogdanov at esat kuleuven be

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Version: 20110511:003002 (All versions of this report)

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