Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2016/793

Side-Channel Analysis of Keymill

Christoph Dobraunig and Maria Eichlseder and Thomas Korak and Florian Mendel

Abstract: One prominent countermeasure against side-channel attacks, especially differential power analysis (DPA), is fresh re-keying. In such schemes, the so-called re-keying function takes the burden of protecting a cryptographic primitive against DPA. To ensure the security of the scheme against side-channel analysis, the used re-keying function has to withstand both simple power analysis (SPA) and differential power analysis (DPA). Recently, at SAC 2016, Keymill---a side-channel resilient key generator (or re-keying function)---has been proposed, which is claimed to be inherently secure against side-channel attacks. In this work, however, we present a DPA attack on Keymill, which is based on the dynamic power consumption of a digital circuit that is tied to the $0\rightarrow1$ and $1\rightarrow0$ switches of its logical gates. Hence, the power consumption of the shift-registers used in Keymill depends on the $0\rightarrow1$ and $1\rightarrow0$ switches of its internal state. This information is sufficient to obtain the internal differential pattern (up to a small number of bits, which have to be brute-forced) of the 4 shift-registers of Keymill after the nonce (or $IV$) has been absorbed. This leads to a practical key-recovery attack on Keymill.

Category / Keywords: side-channel analysis, fresh re-keying, differential power analysis

Original Publication (with minor differences): COSADE 2017

Date: received 19 Aug 2016, last revised 17 Aug 2017

Contact author: christoph dobraunig at iaik tugraz at

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: This version is a minor revision correcting Figure 5.

Version: 20170817:080407 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2016/793

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