Paper 2024/287

CAPABARA: A Combined Attack on CAPA

Abstract

Physical attacks pose a substantial threat to the secure implementation of cryptographic algorithms. While considerable research efforts are dedicated to protecting against passive physical attacks (e.g., side-channel analysis (SCA)), the landscape of protection against other types of physical attacks remains a challenge. Fault attacks (FA), though attracting growing attention in research, still lack the prevalence of provably secure designs when compared to SCA. The realm of combined attacks, which leverage the capabilities of both SCA and FA adversaries, introduces powerful adversarial models, rendering protection against them challenging. This challenge has consequently led to a relatively unexplored area of research, resulting in a notable gap in understanding and efficiently protecting against combined attacks. The CAPA countermeasure, published at CRYPTO 2018, addresses this challenge with a robust adversarial model that goes beyond conventional SCA and FA adversarial models. Drawing inspiration from the principles of Multiparty Computation (MPC), CAPA claims security against higher-order SCA, higher-order fault attacks, and their combination. In this work, we present a combined attack that breaks CAPA within the constraints of its assumed adversarial model. In response, we propose potential fixes to the design of CAPA that increase the complexity of the proposed attack, although not provably thwarting it. With this presented combined attack, we highlight the difficulty of effectively protecting against combined attacks.