Paper 2017/1021

Bricklayer Attack: A Side-Channel Analysis on the ChaCha Quarter Round

Alexandre Adomnicai, Jacques J. A. Fournier, and Laurent Masson

Abstract

ChaCha is a family of stream ciphers that are very efficient on constrainted platforms. In this paper, we present electromagnetic side-channel analyses for two different software implementations of ChaCha20 on a 32-bit architecture: one compiled and another one directly written in assembly. On the device under test, practical experiments show that they have different levels of resistance to side-channel attacks. For the most leakage-resilient implementation, an analysis of the whole quarter round is required. To overcome this complication, we introduce an optimized attack based on a divide-and-conquer strategy named bricklayer attack.

Note: Fix a typo in the proof given in appendix

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. INDOCRYPT 2017
Keywords
ChaChaSide-Channel Attacks
Contact author(s)
alex adomnicai @ gmail com
History
2019-03-27: last of 2 revisions
2017-10-25: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/1021
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/1021,
      author = {Alexandre Adomnicai and Jacques J. A.  Fournier and Laurent Masson},
      title = {Bricklayer Attack: A Side-Channel Analysis on the ChaCha Quarter Round},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/1021},
      year = {2017},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1021}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1021}
}
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