## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2014/770

AES Cipher Keys Suitable for Efficient Side-Channel Vulnerability Evaluation

Takaaki Mizuki and Yu-ichi Hayashi

Abstract: This paper investigates pairs of AES-128 cipher keys and plaintexts which result in being quiet'' in the final round, i.e., whose 128-bit State holds the same bit pattern before and after Round 10. We show that the number of such quiet plaintexts (resulting in Hamming distance 0) for any cipher key is at most 5,914,624, and that there exist exactly 729 cipher keys having such a maximum number. The same holds if quiet'' is replaced by noisy'' (which means to have Hamming distance 128). Because such quiet and noisy plaintexts make extreme actions in the final round of the AES encryption, these AES-128 cipher keys are quite useful for AES hardware designers to efficiently evaluate the vulnerabilities of their products, for instance, the performance of their side-channel attack countermeasures.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / AES

Date: received 30 Sep 2014, last revised 30 Sep 2014

Contact author: tm-paper+aes10rd at g-mail tohoku-university jp

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/2014/770

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