Differential Power Analysis of HMAC SHA-2 in the Hamming Weight Model

Sonia Belaïd (1, 2, 3) , Luk Bettale (4) , Emmanuelle Dottax (4) , Laurie Genelle (4) , Franck Rondepierre (4)

1 CASCADE - Construction and Analysis of Systems for Confidentiality and Authenticity of Data and Entities
2 Thales Communications [Colombes]
3 ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris
4 Oberthur Technologies

As any algorithm manipulating secret data, HMAC is potentially vulnerable to side channel attacks. In 2007, McEvoy et al. proposed a differential power analysis attack against HMAC instantiated with hash functions from the SHA-2 family. Their attack works in the Hamming distance leakage model and makes strong assumptions on the target implementation. In this paper, we present an attack on HMAC SHA-2 in the Hamming weight leakage model, which advantageously can be used when no information is available on the targeted implementation. Furthermore, our attack can be adapted to the Hamming distance model with weaker assumptions on the implementation. We show the feasibility of our attack on simulations, and we study its overall cost and success rate. We also provide an evaluation of the performance overhead induced by the countermeasures necessary to avoid the attack.

Mots clés: Side Channel Analysis; Differential Power Analysis; Hamming Weight; HMAC; SHA-2

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Sonia Belaïd, Luk Bettale, Emmanuelle Dottax, Laurie Genelle, Franck Rondepierre. Differential Power Analysis of HMAC SHA-2 in the Hamming Weight Model. SECRYPT 2013 - 10th International Conference on Security and Cryptography, Jul 2013, Reykjavik, Iceland. ⟨hal-00872410⟩