Protecting the NOEKEON Cipher Against SCARE Attacks in FPGAs by using Dynamic Implementations

Julien Bringer; Herve Chabanne; Jean-Luc Danger

Paper 2009/239

Protecting the NOEKEON Cipher Against SCARE Attacks in FPGAs by using Dynamic Implementations

Julien Bringer, Herve Chabanne, and Jean-Luc Danger

Abstract

Protecting an implementation against Side Channel Analysis for Reverse Engineering (SCARE) attacks is a great challenge and we address this challenge by presenting a first proof of concept. White-box cryptography has been developed to protect programs against an adversary who has full access to their software implementation. It has also been suggested as a countermeasure against side channel attacks and we examine here these techniques in the wider perspective of SCARE. We consider that the adversary has only access to the cryptographic device through its side channels and his goal is to recover the specifications of the algorithm. In this work, we focus on FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) technologies and examine how to thwart SCARE attacks by implementing a block cipher following white-box techniques. The proposed principle is based on changing dynamically the implementations. It is illustrated by an example on the Noekeon cipher and feasibility in different FPGAs is studied.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Appeared at ReConFig09
Keywords: SCARE attacks white-box cryptography FPGA
Contact author(s): julien bringer @ sagem com
History: 2010-01-06: revised; 2009-05-30: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2009/239
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2009/239,
      author = {Julien Bringer and Herve Chabanne and Jean-Luc Danger},
      title = {Protecting the {NOEKEON} Cipher Against {SCARE} Attacks in {FPGAs} by using Dynamic Implementations},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2009/239},
      year = {2009},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/239}
}