## CryptoDB

### Çetin Kaya Koç

#### Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2015
EPRINT
2006
EPRINT
Cache based side-channel attacks have recently been attracted significant attention due to the new developments in the field. In this paper, we present efficient trace-driven cache attacks on a widely used implementation of the AES cryptosystem. We also evaluate the cost of the proposed attacks in detail under the assumption of a noiseless environment. We develop an accurate mathematical model that we use in the cost analysis of our attacks. We use two different metrics, specifically, the expected number of necessary traces and the cost of the analysis phase, for the cost evaluation purposes. Each of these metrics represents the cost of a different phase of the attack.
2006
EPRINT
This paper presents a new software side-channel attack - enabled by the branch prediction capability common to all modern high-performance CPUs. The penalty payed (extra clock cycles) for a mispredicted branch can be used for cryptanalysis of cryptographic primitives that employ a data-dependent program flow. Analogous to the recently described cache-based side-channel attacks our attacks also allow an unprivileged process to attack other processes running in parallel on the same processor, despite sophisticated partitioning methods such as memory protection, sandboxing or even virtualization. We will discuss in detail several such attacks for the example of RSA, and experimentally show their applicability to real systems, such as OpenSSL and Linux. More specifically, we will present four different types of attacks, which are all derived from the basic idea underlying our novel side-channel attack. Moreover, we also demonstrate the strength of the branch prediction side-channel attack by rendering the obvious countermeasure in this context (Montgomery Multiplication with dummy-reduction) as useless. Although the deeper consequences of the latter result make the task of writing an efficient and secure modular expeonentiation (or scalar multiplication on an elliptic curve) a challenging task, we will eventually suggest some countermeasures to mitigate branch prediction side-channel attacks.
2006
EPRINT
Very recently, a new software side-channel attack, called Branch Prediction Analysis (BPA) attack, has been discovered and also demonstrated to be practically feasible on popular commodity PC platforms. While the above recent attack still had the flavor of a classical timing attack against RSA, where one uses many execution-time measurements under the same key in order to statistically amplify some small but key-dependent timing differences, we dramatically improve upon the former result. We prove that a carefully written spy-process running simultaneously with an RSA-process, is able to collect during one \emph{single} RSA signing execution almost all of the secret key bits. We call such an attack, analyzing the CPU's Branch Predictor states through spying on a single quasi-parallel computation process, a \emph{Simple Branch Prediction Analysis (SBPA)} attack --- sharply differentiating it from those one relying on statistical methods and requiring many computation measurements under the same key. The successful extraction of almost all secret key bits by our SBPA attack against an openSSL RSA implementation proves that the often recommended blinding or so called randomization techniques to protect RSA against side-channel attacks are, in the context of SBPA attacks, totally useless. Additional to that very crucial security implication, targeted at such implementations which are assumed to be at least statistically secure, our successful SBPA attack also bears another equally critical security implication. Namely, in the context of simple side-channel attacks, it is widely believed that equally balancing the operations after branches is a secure countermeasure against such simple attacks. Unfortunately, this is not true, as even such balanced branch'' implementations can be completely broken by our SBPA attacks. Moreover, despite sophisticated hardware-assisted partitioning methods such as memory protection, sandboxing or even virtualization, SBPA attacks empower an unprivileged process to successfully attack other processes running in parallel on the same processor. Thus, we conclude that SBPA attacks are much more dangerous than previously anticipated, as they obviously do not belong to the same category as pure timing attacks.
2002
CHES
2001
CHES
2001
CHES
2000
CHES
1999
CHES

#### Program Committees

CHES 2010
CHES 2009
CHES 2008
CHES 2007
CHES 2006
CHES 2005
CHES 2004
CHES 2003 (Program chair)
CHES 2002 (Program chair)
CHES 2001 (Program chair)
CHES 2000 (Program chair)
CHES 1999 (Program chair)