International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 27 March 2023

Yuiko Matsubara, Daiki Miyahara, Yohei Watanabe, Mitsugu Iwamoto, Kazuo Sakiyama
ePrint Report ePrint Report
A thread of physical attacks that try to obtain secret information from cryptographic modules has been of academic and practical interest. One of the concerns is determining its efficiency, e.g., the number of attack trials to recover the secret key. However, the accurate estimation of the attack efficiency is generally expensive because of the complexity of the physical attack on a cryptographic algorithm. Based on this background, in this study, we propose a new abstraction model for evaluating the attack efficiency of the probing and DFA attacks. The proposed model includes an abstracted attack target and attacker to determine the amount of leaked information obtained in a single attack trial. We can adapt the model flexibly to various attack scenarios and can get the attack efficiency quickly and precisely. In the probing attack on AES, the difference in the attack efficiency is only approximately 0.3% between the model and experimental values, whereas that of a previous model is approximately 16%. We also apply the probing attack on DES, and the results show that DES has a high resistance to the probing attack. Moreover, the proposed model works accurately also for the DFA attack on AES.
Expand

Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.