Paper 2014/701

A Practical Iterative Side Channel Cube Attack on AES-128/256

Erfan Aghaee and Majid Rahimi and Hamed Yusefi

Abstract

The Side Channel Cube Attack (SCCA) is a kind of Algebraic Side Channel Attack (ASCA) consisting of theoretical and practical aspects. This paper presents a general framework for the SCCA (called an Iterative SCCA (ISCCA)) on block ciphers in which these aspects are explained and the requirements are listed. On the theoretical side, we use extracting quadratic equations, recognizing iterated chosen plaintexts, and cube iteration to improve the SCCA on block ciphers. On the experimental side, we define a feasible scenario in which ISCCA can be applied on block ciphers. Then, we implement the ISCCA on AES and verify the results on an ARM micro controller. Finally, we compare the proposed SCCA (ISCCA) with the Simple Power Analysis, the previous SCCAs, and the previous attacks on AES. This comparison is based on the template building and data, time, and memory complexity. We show that the SCCA can recover 128 and 256 key bits of the AES-128/256 only with data complexity 2^{7.3}, time complexity 2^{15.74}, and memory complexity 2^{7.89} on AES-128, and data complexity 2^{7.75}, time complexity 2^{16.2}, and memory complexity 2^{8.21} on AES-256. We show only nine interesting points are needed for template matching phase. This is the most efficient SCCA on AES-128/256.