Algebraic Side-Channel Attacks on the AES: Why Time also Matters in DPA

Algebraic side-channel attacks have been recently introduced as a powerful cryptanalysis technique against block ciphers. These attacks represent both a target algorithm and its physical information leakages as an overdefined system of equations that the adversary tries to solve. They were first applied to PRESENT because of its simple algebraic structure. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which they can be exploited against the AES Rijndael and discuss their practical specificities. We show experimentally that most of the intuitions that hold for PRESENT can also be observed for an unprotected implementation of Rijndael in an 8-bit controller. Namely, algebraic side-channel attacks can recover the AES master key with the observation of a single encrypted plaintext and they easily deal with unknown plaintexts/ciphertexts in this context. Because these attacks can take advantage of the physical information corresponding to all the cipher rounds, they imply that one cannot trad...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CHES
• Authors: François-Xavier Standaert, Mathieu Renauld, Nicolas Veyrat-Charvillon
• Keywords: Algebraic Side-channel Attacks, CHES 2009, Classical Side-channel Attacks, Cryptography, Simple Algebraic Structure