Paper 2008/021

Block Ciphers Implementations Provably Secure Against Second Order Side Channel Analysis

Matthieu Rivain, Emmanuelle Dottax, and Emmanuel Prouff

Abstract

In the recent years, side channel analysis has received a lot of attention, and attack techniques have been improved. Side channel analysis of second order is now successful in breaking implementations of block ciphers supposed to be effectively protected. This progress shows not only the practicability of second order attacks, but also the need for provably secure countermeasures. Surprisingly, while many studies have been dedicated to the attacks, only a few papers have been published about the dedicated countermeasures. In fact, only the method proposed by Schramm and Paar at CT-RSA 2006 enables to thwart second order side channel analysis. In this paper, we introduce two new methods which constitute a worthwhile alternative to Schramm and Paar's proposition. We prove their security in a strong security model and we exhibit a way to signifficantly improve their efficiency by using the particularities of the targeted architectures. Finally, we argue that the introduced methods allow to efficiently protect a wide variety of block ciphers, including AES.