A Methodology for the Characterisation of Leakages in Combinatorial Logic

Guido Bertoni; Marco Martinoli

Paper 2016/841

A Methodology for the Characterisation of Leakages in Combinatorial Logic

Guido Bertoni and Marco Martinoli

Abstract

Glitches represent a great danger for hardware implementations of cryptographic schemes. Their intrinsic random nature makes them difficult to tackle and their occurrence threatens side-channel protections. Although countermeasures aiming at structurally solving the problem already exist, they usually require some effort to be applied or introduce non-negligible overhead in the design. Our work addresses the gap between such countermeasures and the naïve implementation of schemes being vulnerable in the presence of glitches. Our contribution is twofold: (1) we expand the mathematical framework proposed by Brzozowski and Ësik (FMSD 2003) by meaningfully adding the notion of information leakage, (2) thanks to which we define a formal methodology for the analysis of vulnerabilities in combinatorial circuits when glitches are taken into account.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Minor revision. SPACE 2016
Contact author(s): marco martinoli @ bristol ac uk
History: 2016-09-29: last of 3 revisions; 2016-09-06: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2016/841
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/841,
      author = {Guido Bertoni and Marco Martinoli},
      title = {A Methodology for the Characterisation of Leakages in Combinatorial Logic},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2016/841},
      year = {2016},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/841}
}