Paper 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.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
AES
Contact author(s)
tm-paper+aes10rd @ g-mail tohoku-university jp
History
2014-09-30: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2014/770
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2014/770,
      author = {Takaaki Mizuki and Yu-ichi Hayashi},
      title = {{AES} Cipher Keys Suitable for Efficient Side-Channel Vulnerability Evaluation},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2014/770},
      year = {2014},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/770}
}
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