SCATTER : A New Dimension in Side-Channel

Hugues Thiebeauld (1) , Georges Gagnerot (2) , Antoine Wurcker (3) , Christophe Clavier (4)

1 RFI Global Services Ltd.
2 DMI
3 XLIM-DMI - DMI
4 XLIM-MATHIS - Mathématiques & Sécurité de l'information

Side-channel techniques have well progressed over the last few years, leading to the creation of a variety of statistical tools for extracting the secrets used in cryptographic algorithms. Such techniques are taking advantage of the side-channel traces collected during the executions of secret computations in the product. Noticeably, the vast majority of side-channel attacks requires the traces have been aligned together beforehand. This prerequisite turns out to be more and more challenging in the practical realisation of attacks as many devices include hardware or software countermeasures to increase this difficulty. This is typically achieved applying random jittering or random executions with fake operations. In this paper, we introduce scatter, a new attack which has the potential to tackle most of the alignment issues. scatter brings a new dimension to improve the efficiency of existing attacks and opens the door to a large set of potential new attack techniques. The effectiveness of scatter has been proven on both simulated traces and real word secure products. As a result, scatter is a new side-channel technique particularly powerful when the trace alignment represents an issue, or even when considering low-cost attacks, as the requirements in terms of equipment and expertise are significantly reduced.

Mots clés: side-channel; scatter; mutual information; Pearson chi- squared

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Hugues Thiebeauld, Georges Gagnerot, Antoine Wurcker, Christophe Clavier. SCATTER : A New Dimension in Side-Channel. [Research Report] 2017/706, IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive. 2017. ⟨hal-02486924⟩