There is Wisdom in Harnessing the Strengths of your Enemy: Customized Encoding to Thwart Side-Channel Attacks - Extended Version

Abstract. Side-channel attacks are an important concern for the security of cryptographic algorithms. To counteract it, a recent line of research has investigated the use of software encoding functions such as dual-rail rather than the well known masking countermeasure. The core idea consists in encoding the sensitive data with a fixed Hamming weight value and perform all operations following this fashion. This new set of countermeasures applies to all devices that leak a function of the Hamming weight of the internal variables. However when the leakage model deviates from this idealized model, the claimed security guarantee vanishes. In this work, we introduce a framework that aims at building customized encoding functions according to the precise leakage model based on stochastic profiling. We specifically investigate how to take advantage of adversary’s knowledge of the physical leakage to select the corresponding optimal encoding. Our solution has been evaluated within several...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: IACR
• Authors: Houssem Maghrebi, Victor Servant, Julien Bringer
• Keywords: Biometrics, IACR 2016