Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/770

Efficient Template Attacks

Omar Choudary and Markus G. Kuhn

Abstract: Template attacks remain a powerful side-channel technique to eavesdrop on tamper-resistant hardware. They model the probability distribution of leaking signals and noise to guide a search for secret data values. In practice, several numerical obstacles can arise when implementing such attacks with multivariate normal distributions. We propose efficient methods to avoid these. We also demonstrate how to achieve significant performance improvements, both in terms of information extracted and computational cost, by pooling covariance estimates across all data values. We provide a detailed and systematic overview of many different options for implementing such attacks. Our experimental evaluation of all these methods based on measuring the supply current of a byte-load instruction executed in an unprotected 8-bit microcontroller leads to practical guidance for choosing an attack algorithm.

Category / Keywords: implementation / side-channel analysis, template attack, fair evaluation

Original Publication (with minor differences): CARDIS 2013

Date: received 20 Nov 2013, last revised 14 May 2014

Contact author: omar choudary at cl cam ac uk

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: Updated version, including conclusions section which was missing in the previous submission.

Version: 20140514:133726 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/770

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion