Paper 2016/710

Keymill: Side-Channel Resilient Key Generator

Mostafa Taha, Arash Reyhani-Masoleh, and Patrick Schaumont

Abstract

In the crypto community, it is widely acknowledged that any cryptographic scheme that is built with no countermeasure against side-channel analysis (SCA) can be easily broken. In this paper, we challenge this intuition. We investigate a novel approach in the design of cryptographic primitives that promotes inherent security against side-channel analysis without using redundant circuits. We propose Keymill, a new keystream generator that is immune against SCA attacks. Security of the proposed scheme depends on mixing key bits in a special way that expands the size of any useful key hypothesis to the full entropy, which enables SCA-security that is equivalent to the brute force. Doing so, we do not propose a better SCA countermeasure, but rather a new one. The current solution focuses exclusively on side-channel analysis and works on top of any unprotected block cipher for mathematical security. The proposed primitive is generic and can turn any block cipher into a protected mode using only 775 equivalent NAND gates, which is almost half the area of the best countermeasure available in the literature.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC 2016)
Keywords
Side-Channel AnalysisKeystream Generator
Contact author(s)
mtaha @ vt edu
History
2016-07-18: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/710
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/710,
      author = {Mostafa Taha and Arash Reyhani-Masoleh and Patrick Schaumont},
      title = {Keymill: Side-Channel Resilient Key Generator},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2016/710},
      year = {2016},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/710}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/710}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.