Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/735

Masking Tables---An Underestimated Security Risk

Michael Tunstall and Carolyn Whitnall and Elisabeth Oswald

Abstract: The literature on side-channel analysis describes numerous masking schemes designed to protect block ciphers at the implementation level. Such masking schemes typically require the computation of masked tables prior to the execution of an encryption function. In this paper we revisit an attack which directly exploits this computation in such a way as to recover all or some of the masks used. We show that securely implementing masking schemes is only possible where one has access to a significant amount of random numbers.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / Side-channel analysis, secure implementations, block ciphers

Original Publication (in the same form): IACR-FSE-2013

Date: received 8 Nov 2013

Contact author: mike tunstall at yahoo co uk

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20131114:060637 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/735

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