Paper 2015/537

Towards Easy Leakage Certification

François Durvaux, François-Xavier Standaert, and Santos Merino Del Pozo

Abstract

Side-channel attacks generally rely on the availability of good leakage models to extract sensitive information from cryptographic implementations. The recently introduced leakage certification tests aim to guarantee that this condition is fulfilled based on sound statistical arguments. They are important ingredients in the evaluation of leaking devices since they allow a good separation between engineering challenges (how to produce clean measurements) and cryptographic ones (how to exploit these measurements). In this paper, we propose an alternative leakage certification test that is significantly simpler to implement than the previous proposal from Eurocrypt 2014. This gain admittedly comes at the cost of a couple of heuristic (yet reasonable) assumptions on the leakage distribution. To confirm its relevance, we first show that it allows confirming previous results of leakage certification. We then put forward that it leads to additional and useful intuitions regarding the information losses caused by incorrect assumptions in leakage modeling.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
A minor revision of an IACR publication in CHES 2016
Keywords
implementation
Contact author(s)
fstandae @ uclouvain be
History
2016-06-03: last of 2 revisions
2015-06-08: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/537
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/537,
      author = {François Durvaux and François-Xavier Standaert and Santos Merino Del Pozo},
      title = {Towards Easy Leakage Certification},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2015/537},
      year = {2015},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/537}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/537}
}
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