Ciphertext and Plaintext Leakage Reveals the Entire TDES Key

SCA(Side-channel analysis) is a well-known method to recover the sensitive data stored in security products. Meanwhile numerous countermeasures for hardware implementation of cryptographic algorithms are proposed to protect the internal data against this attack fortunately. However, some designs are not aware that the protection of the plaintext and ciphertext is also crucial. In this work, we attack an implementation TDES(triple DES) by taking advantage of such leakages detected in a widely used commercial product which is based on the hardware platform that passed the EAL5+ certification. In particular, we guess entire DES keys to construct hypotheses for the intermediate outputs in a TDES calculation. The time cost for this approach is nearly $\frac{1}{2^{32}}$ of that by a brute force. Furthermore, if in addition leakage about the key becomes available, the attack costs become practical. That is, reducing the key entropy of every DES key to $2^{28}$ allows an enumeration of the entire TDES in 21.6 hours

Hardware-Assisted Secure Computation

The theory community has worked on Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) for more than two decades, and has produced many protocols for many settings. One common thread in these works is that the protocols cannot use a Trusted Third Party (TTP), even though this is conceptually the simplest and most general solution. Thus, current protocols involve only the direct players---we call such protocols self-reliant. They often use blinded boolean circuits, which has several sources of overhead, some due to the circuit representation and some due to the blinding. However, secure coprocessors like the IBM 4758 have actual security properties similar to ideal TTPs. They also have little RAM and a slow CPU.We call such devices Tiny TTPs. The availability of real tiny TTPs opens the door for a different approach to SMC problems. One major challenge with this approach is how to execute large programs on large inputs using the small protected memory of a tiny TTP, while preserving the trust properties that an ideal TTP provides. In this thesis we have investigated the use of real TTPs to help with the solution of SMC problems. We start with the use of such TTPs to solve the Private Information Retrieval (PIR) problem, which is one important instance of SMC. Our implementation utilizes a 4758. The rest of the thesis is targeted at general SMC. Our SMC system, Faerieplay, moves some functionality into a tiny TTP, and thus avoids the blinded circuit overhead. Faerieplay consists of a compiler from high-level code to an arithmetic circuit with special gates for efficient indirect array access, and a virtual machine to execute this circuit on a tiny TTP while maintaining the typical SMC trust properties. We report on Faerieplay\u27s security properties, the specification of its components, and our implementation and experiments. These include comparisons with the Fairplay circuit-based two-party system, and an implementation of the Dijkstra graph shortest path algorithm. We also provide an implementation of an oblivious RAM which supports similar tiny TTP-based SMC functionality but using a standard RAM program. Performance comparisons show Faerieplay\u27s circuit approach to be considerably faster, at the expense of a more constrained programming environment when targeting a circuit

Comparative Study of Various Approximations to the Covariance Matrix in Template Attacks

Template attacks have been shown to be among the strongest attacks when it comes to side–channel attacks. An essential ingredient there is to calculate the inverse of a covariance matrix. In this paper we make a comparative study of the effectiveness of some 24 different variants of template attacks based on different approximations of this covariance matrix. As an example, we have chosen a recent smart card where the plain text, cipher text, as well as the key leak strongly. Some of the more commonly chosen approximations to the covariance matrix turn out to be not very effective, whilst others are

Towards Fully Automated Analysis of Whiteboxes: Perfect Dimensionality Reduction for Perfect Leakage

Differential computation analysis (DCA) is a technique recently introduced by Bos et al. and Sanfelix et al. for key recovery from whitebox implementations of symmetric ciphers. It consists in applying the differential power analysis approach to software execution traces that are obtained by tracing the memory accesses of a whitebox application. While being very effective, DCA relies on analyst intuition to be efficient. In particular, memory range selection is needed to prevent software execution traces from becoming prohibitively long. Moreover, analyst failure to specify the relevant range lets the vulnerable whitebox implementation be evaluated as secure. We present a novel approach for dimensionality reduction of software execution traces, that takes a significant part of analyst intuition out of the loop. The approach exploits the lack of measurement noise in the traces and selects only the samples that are relevant for the key recovery. Our experiments with the published whitebox implementations show that the length of software execution traces can be automatically reduced to a few dozens of bits. This results in an attack speedup of several orders of magnitude, which in turn facilitates the use of more computationally intensive DCA flavours such as multiple leakage targets proposed by Klemsa. Our approach simplifies the methodology for whitebox analysis down to the tracing of a large default memory range, letting our dimensionality reduction techniques extract the relevant points for DCA, and run the attack on multiple leakage targets, excluding analyst errors and saving analysis time. It also provides quick insights in case of whitebox implementations with additional protection layers such as encodings, and can be used to identify the range for fault injection in differential fault analysis. We make our techniques available to the community as a part of a free/libre open-source side channel analysis toolkit. We believe they are a step forward for fully automated whitebox analysis tools

Anonymity and trust in the electronic world

Privacy has never been an explicit goal of authorization mechanisms. The traditional approach to authorisation relies on strong authentication of a stable identity using long term credentials. Audit is then linked to authorization via the same identity. Such an approach compels users to enter into a trust relationship with large parts of the system infrastructure, including entities in remote domains. In this dissertation we advance the view that this type of compulsive trust relationship is unnecessary and can have undesirable consequences. We examine in some detail the consequences which such undesirable trust relationships can have on individual privacy, and investigate the extent to which taking a unified approach to trust and anonymity can actually provide useful leverage to address threats to privacy without compromising the principal goals of authentication and audit. We conclude that many applications would benefit from mechanisms which enabled them to make authorization decisions without using long-term credentials. We next propose specific mechanisms to achieve this, introducing a novel notion of a short-lived electronic identity, which we call a surrogate. This approach allows a localisation of trust and entities are not compelled to transitively trust other entities in remote domains. In particular, resolution of stable identities needs only ever to be done locally to the entity named. Our surrogates allow delegation, enable role-based access control policies to be enforced across multiple domains, and permit the use of non-anonymous payment mechanisms, all without compromising the privacy of a user. The localisation of trust resulting from the approach proposed in this dissertation also has the potential to allow clients to control the risks to which they are exposed by bearing the cost of relevant countermeasures themselves, rather than forcing clients to trust the system infrastructure to protect them and to bear an equal share of the cost of all countermeasures whether or not effective for them. This consideration means that our surrogate-based approach and mechanisms are of interest even in Kerberos-like scenarios where anonymity is not a requirement, but the remote authentication mechanism is untrustworthy