Side Channel Leakage Exploitation, Mitigation and Detection of Emerging Cryptosystems

Chen, Cong

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Side Channel Leakage Exploitation, Mitigation and Detection of Emerging Cryptosystems

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With the emerging computing technologies and applications in the past decades, cryptography is facing tremendous challenges in its position of guarding our digital world. The advent of quantum computers is potentially going to cease the dominance of RSA and other public key algorithms based on hard problems of factorization and discrete logarithm. In order to protect the Internet at post-quantum era, great efforts have been dedicated to the design of RSA substitutions. One of them is code- based McEliece public key schemes which are immune to quantum attacks. Meanwhile, new infrastructures like Internet of Things are bringing the world enormous benefits but, due to the resource-constrained nature, require compact and still reliable cryptographic solutions. Motivated by this, many lightweight cryptographic algorithms are introduced. Nevertheless, side channel attack is still a practical threat for implementations of these new algorithms if no countermeasures are employed. In the past decades two major categories of side channel countermeasures, namely masking and hiding, have been studied to mitigate the threat of such attacks. As a masking countermeasure, Threshold Implementation becomes popular in recent years. It is sound in providing provable side channel resistance for hardware-based cryptosystems but meanwhile it also incurs significant overheads which need further optimization for constrained applications. Masking, especially for higher order masking schemes, requires low signal-to-noise ratio to be effective which can be achieved by applying hiding countermeasures. In order to evaluate side channel resistance of countermeasures, several tools have been introduced. Due to its simplicity, TVLA is being accepted by academy and industry as a one-size-fit-all leakage detection methodolgy that can be used by non-experts. However, its effectiveness can be negatively impacted by environmental factors such as temperature variations. Thus, a robust and simple evaluation method is desired. In this dissertation, we first show how differential power analysis can efficiently exploit the power consumption of a McEliece implementation to recover the private key. Then, we apply Threshold Implementation scheme in order to protect from the proposed attack. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first time of applying Threshold Implementation in a public key cryptosystem. Next, we investigate the reduction of shares in Threshold Implementation so as to bring down its overhead for constrained applications. Our study shows that Threshold Implementation using only two shares reduces the overheads while still provides reliable first-order resistance but in the meantime it also leaks a strong second-order leakage. We also propose a hiding countermeasure, namely balanced encoding scheme based on the idea of Dual- Rail Pre-charge logic style in hardwares. We show that it is effective to mitigate the leakage and can be combined with masking schemes to achieve better resistance. Finally, we study paired t-test versus Welch's t-test in the original TVLA and show its robustness against environmental noises. We also found that using moving average in computing t statistics can detect higher-order leakage faster.

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