Paper 2015/411

Side-Channel Analysis of MAC-Keccak Hardware Implementations

Pei Luo, Yunsi Fei, Xin Fang, A. Adam Ding, David R. Kaeli, and Miriam Leeser

Abstract

As Keccak has been selected as the new SHA-3 standard, Message Authentication Code (MAC) (MAC-Keccak) using a secret key will be widely used for integrity checking and authenticity assurance. Recent works have shown the feasibility of side-channel attacks against software implementations of MAC-Keccak to retrieve the key, with the security assessment of hardware implementations remaining an open problem. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and practical side-channel analysis of a hardware implementation of MAC-Keccak on FPGA. Different from previous works, we propose a new attack method targeting the first round output of MAC-Keccak rather than the linear operation $\theta$ only. The results on sampled power traces show that the unprotected hardware implementation of MAC-Keccak is vulnerable to side-channel attacks, and attacking the nonlinear operation of MAC-Keccak is very effective. We further discuss countermeasures against side-channel analysis on hardware MAC-Keccak. Finally, we discuss the impact of the key length on side-channel analysis and compare the attack complexity between MAC-Keccak and other cryptographic algorithms.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy (HASP) 2015
Keywords
side-channel attacksSHA-3
Contact author(s)
silenceluo @ gmail com
History
2015-05-01: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/411
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/411,
      author = {Pei Luo and Yunsi Fei and Xin Fang and A.  Adam Ding and David R.  Kaeli and Miriam Leeser},
      title = {Side-Channel Analysis of MAC-Keccak Hardware Implementations},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2015/411},
      year = {2015},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/411}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/411}
}
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