Fast and Memory-Efficient Key Recovery in Side-Channel Attacks

Abstract. Side-channel attacks are powerful techniques to attack imple-mentations of cryptographic algorithms by observing its physical param-eters such as power consumption and electromagnetic radiation that are modulated by the secret state. Most side-channel attacks are of divide-and-conquer nature, that is, they yield a ranked list of secret key chunks, e.g., the subkey bytes in AES. The problem of the key recovery is then to find the correct combined key. An optimal key enumeration algorithm (OKEA) was proposed by Charvil-lon et al at SAC’12. Given the ranked key chunks together with their probabilities, this algorithm outputs the full combined keys in the opti-mal order – from more likely to less likely ones. OKEA uses plenty of memory by its nature though, which limits its practical efficiency. Espe-cially in the cases where the side-channel traces are noisy, the memory and running time requirements to find the right key can be prohibitively high. To tackle this problem, we propose a score-based key enumeration algo-rithm (SKEA). Though it is suboptimal in terms of the output order of cadidate combined keys, SKEA’s memory and running time requirements are more practical than those of OKEA. We verify the advantage at the example of a DPA attack on an 8-bit embedded software implementation of AES-128. We vary the number of traces available to the adversary and report a significant increase in the success rate of the key recovery due to SKEA when compared to OKEA, within practical limitations on time and memory. We also compare SKEA to the probabilistic key enumera-tion algorithm (PKEA) by Meier and Staffelbach and show its practical superiority in this case. SKEA is efficiently parallelizable. We propose a high-performance solu-tion for the entire conquer stage of side-channel attacks that includes SKEA and the subsequent full key testing, using AES-NI on Haswell Intel CPUs. 2 A. Bogdanov et al

The Lane hash function

We propose the cryptographic hash function Lane as a candidate for the SHA-3 competition organised by NIST. Lane is an iterated hash function supporting multiple digest sizes. Components of the AES block cipher are reused as building blocks. Lane aims to be secure, easy to understand, elegant and flexible in implementation

AES-Based Authenticated Encryption Modes in Parallel High-Performance Software

Authenticated encryption (AE) has recently gained renewed interest due to the ongoing CAESAR competition. This paper deals with the performance of block cipher modes of operation for AE in parallel software. We consider the example of the AES on Intel\u27s new Haswell microarchitecture that has improved instructions for AES and finite field multiplication. As opposed to most previous high-performance software implementations of operation modes -- that have considered the encryption of single messages -- we propose to process multiple messages in parallel. We demonstrate that this message scheduling is of significant advantage for most modes. As a baseline for longer messages, the performance of AES-CBC encryption on a single core increases by factor 6.8 when adopting this approach. For the first time, we report optimized AES-NI implementations of the novel AE modes OTR, CLOC, COBRA, SILC, McOE-G, POET and Julius -- both with single and multiple messages. For almost all AE modes considered, we obtain a consistent speed-up when processing multiple messages in parallel. Notably, among the nonce-based modes, CCM, CLOC and SILC get by factor 3.7 faster, achieving a performance comparable to GCM (the latter, however, possessing classes of weak keys), with OCB3 still performing at only 0.77 cpb. Among the nonce-misuse resistant modes, McOE-G receives a speed-up by more than factor 4 with a performance of about 1.62 cpb, with COPA consistently performing best at 1.45 cpb

When Intrusion Detection Meets Blockchain Technology: A Review

With the purpose of identifying cyber threats and possible incidents, intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are widely deployed in various computer networks. In order to enhance the detection capability of a single IDS, collaborative intrusion detection networks (or collaborative IDSs) have been developed, which allow IDS nodes to exchange data with each other. However, data and trust management still remain two challenges for current detection architectures, which may degrade the effectiveness of such detection systems. In recent years, blockchain technology has shown its adaptability in many fields, such as supply chain management, international payment, interbanking, and so on. As blockchain can protect the integrity of data storage and ensure process transparency, it has a potential to be applied to intrusion detection domain. Motivated by this, this paper provides a review regarding the intersection of IDSs and blockchains. In particular, we introduce the background of intrusion detection and blockchain, discuss the applicability of blockchain to intrusion detection, and identify open challenges in this direction

Multivariate Profiling of Hulls for Linear Cryptanalysis

Extensions of linear cryptanalysis making use of multiple approximations, such as multiple and multidimensional linear cryptanalysis, are an important tool in symmetric-key cryptanalysis, among others being responsible for the best known attacks on ciphers such as Serpent and present. At CRYPTO 2015, Huang et al. provided a refined analysis of the key-dependent capacity leading to a refined key equivalence hypothesis, however at the cost of additional assumptions. Their analysis was extended by Blondeau and Nyberg to also cover an updated wrong key randomization hypothesis, using similar assumptions. However, a recent result by Nyberg shows the equivalence of linear dependence and statistical dependence of linear approximations, which essentially invalidates a crucial assumption on which all these multidimensional models are based. In this paper, we develop a model for linear cryptanalysis using multiple linearly independent approximations which takes key-dependence into account and complies with Nyberg’s result. Our model considers an arbitrary multivariate joint distribution of the correlations, and in particular avoids any assumptions regarding normality. The analysis of this distribution is then tailored to concrete ciphers in a practically feasible way by combining a signal/noise decomposition approach for the linear hulls with a profiling of the actual multivariate distribution of the signal correlations for a large number of keys, thereby entirely avoiding assumptions regarding the shape of this distribution. As an application of our model, we provide an attack on 26 rounds of present which is faster and requires less data than previous attacks, while using more realistic assumptions and far fewer approximations. We successfully extend the attack to present the first 27-round attack which takes key-dependence into account

SUNDAE: Small Universal Deterministic Authenticated Encryption for the Internet of Things

Lightweight cryptography was developed in response to the increasing need to secure devices for the Internet of Things. After significant research effort, many new block ciphers have been designed targeting lightweight settings, optimizing efficiency metrics which conventional block ciphers did not. However, block ciphers must be used in modes of operation to achieve more advanced security goals such as data confidentiality and authenticity, a research area given relatively little attention in the lightweight setting. We introduce a new authenticated encryption (AE) mode of operation, SUNDAE, specially targeted for constrained environments. SUNDAE is smaller than other known lightweight modes in implementation area, such as CLOC, JAMBU, and COFB, however unlike these modes, SUNDAE is designed as a deterministic authenticated encryption (DAE) scheme, meaning it provides maximal security in settings where proper randomness is hard to generate, or secure storage must be minimized due to expense. Unlike other DAE schemes, such as GCM-SIV, SUNDAE can be implemented efficiently on both constrained devices, as well as the servers communicating with those devices. We prove SUNDAE secure relative to its underlying block cipher, and provide an extensive implementation study, with results in both software and hardware, demonstrating that SUNDAE offers improved compactness and power consumption in hardware compared to other lightweight AE modes, while simultaneously offering comparable performance to GCM-SIV on parallel high-end platforms

Weak-Key Analysis of POET

We evaluate the security of the recently proposed authenticated encryption scheme POET with regard to weak keys when its universal hash functions are instantiated with finite field multiplications. We give explicit constructions for weak key classes not covered by POET\u27s weak key testing strategy, and demonstrate how to leverage them to obtain universal forgeries

Twisted Polynomials and Forgery Attacks on GCM

Polynomial hashing as an instantiation of universal hashing is a widely employed method for the construction of MACs and authenticated encryption (AE) schemes, the ubiquitous GCM being a prominent example. It is also used in recent AE proposals within the CAESAR competition which aim at providing nonce misuse resistance, such as POET. The algebraic structure of polynomial hashing has given rise to security concerns: At CRYPTO~2008, Handschuh and Preneel describe key recovery attacks, and at FSE~2013, Procter and Cid provide a comprehensive framework for forgery attacks. Both approaches rely heavily on the ability to construct \emph{forgery polynomials} having disjoint sets of roots, with many roots (``weak keys\u27\u27) each. Constructing such polynomials beyond naïve approaches is crucial for these attacks, but still an open problem. In this paper, we comprehensively address this issue. We propose to use \emph{twisted polynomials} from Ore rings as forgery polynomials. We show how to construct sparse forgery polynomials with full control over the sets of roots. We also achieve complete and explicit disjoint coverage of the key space by these polynomials. We furthermore leverage this new construction in an improved key recovery algorithm. As cryptanalytic applications of our twisted polynomials, we develop the first universal forgery attacks on GCM in the weak-key model that do not require nonce reuse. Moreover, we present universal weak-key forgery attacks for the recently proposed nonce-misuse resistant AE schemes POET, Julius, and COBRA