### Information Theoretic Evaluation of Side-Channel Resistant Logic Styles

Francois Mace, Francois-Xavier Standaert, and Jean-Jacques Quisquater

##### Abstract

We propose to apply an information theoretic metric to the evaluation of side-channel resistant logic styles. Due to the long design and development time required for the physical evaluation of such hardware countermeasures, our analysis is based on simulations. Although they do not aim to replace the need of actual measurements, we show that simulations can be used as a meaningful first step in the validation chain of a cryptographic product. For illustration purposes, we apply our methodology to gate-level simulations of different logic styles and stress that it allows a significant improvement of the previously considered evaluation methods. In particular, our results allow putting forward the respective strengths and weaknesses of actual countermeasures and determining to which extent they can practically lead to secure implementations (with respect to a noise parameter), if adversaries were provided with simulation-based side-channel traces. Most importantly, the proposed methodology can be straightforwardly adapted to adversaries provided with any other kind of leakage traces (including physical ones).

Note: More details are available on: http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/~fstandae/tsca/

Available format(s)
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. The paper was published in the proceedings of CHES 2007. This ePrint version contains corrected notations in order to comply with the updated notations of the model in: http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/139.
Keywords
side-channel attackshardware countermeasures
Contact author(s)
fstandae @ uclouvain be
History
2008-02-08: revised
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2008/005

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2008/005,
author = {Francois Mace and Francois-Xavier Standaert and Jean-Jacques Quisquater},
title = {Information Theoretic Evaluation of Side-Channel Resistant Logic Styles},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2008/005},
year = {2008},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2008/005}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2008/005}
}

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