Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2014/854

Power Analysis Attack on Hardware Implementation of MAC-Keccak on FPGAs

Pei Luo, Yunsi Fei, Xin Fang, A. Adam Ding, Miriam Leeser, and David R. Kaeli

Abstract: Keccak is the hash function selected by NIST as the new SHA-3 standard. Keccak is built on Sponge construction and it provides a new MAC function called MAC-Keccak. These new algorithms have raised questions with regards to side-channel leakage and analysis attacks of MAC-Keccak. So far there exists prior work on attacks of software implementations of MAC-Keccak, but there has been no comprehensive side-channel vulnerability assessment of its hardware implementation. In this paper we describe an attack on the $\theta$ step of the first round of MAC-Keccak implemented on an FPGA. We construct several different side-channel leakage models and implement attacks based on them. Our work shows that an unmasked hardware implementation of SHA-3 is vulnerable to power-based side-channel attacks.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / SHA-3, MAC-Keccak, Side-channel attacks

Original Publication (in the same form): 2014 International Conference on ReConFigurable Computing and FPGAs (ReConFig)

Date: received 17 Oct 2014, last revised 30 Oct 2014

Contact author: silenceluo at gmail com

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20141030:204134 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2014/854

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