Presentation title
Empirical evaluation of the resilience of novel non-algebraic AES S-Boxes to power side-channel attacksAuthors
Samuele Cerini and Nicolò MauneroInstitution(s)
CINI Cybersecurity National Laboratory and Polytechnic of TurinPresentation type
Technical presentationAbstract
In the area of hardware security, the exploitation of Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) to attack hardware devices has become a major issue in the last 20 years.
The study of effective countermeasures is crucial, as this class of attacks reaches higher rates of effectiveness with respect to classical cryptanalysis. While implementation-level countermeasures are achieving promising results, the academic community has recently focused on solutions that can reduce leakage from the cryptographic mathematical layer, regardless of the underlying hardware/software architecture. In the field of symmetric encryption schemes (such as AES), novel substitution structures have been proposed, claiming an improved side-channel resistance without any additional costs in terms of area, performance or power consumption. To the best of our knowledge, most of these solutions have been studied only from a mathematical point of view, and are still lacking practical experimentation on resource-constrained devices.
This presentation shows an empirical evaluation of the latest AES S-Box proposals. The necessary data has been collected in a reference scenario with limited noise effects, targeting an unprotected software implementation of the AES-128 algorithm running on an 8-bit microcontroller. The results show that despite claims of resistance to SCA, these new countermeasures do not provide significantly improved protection over the standard version of AES, let alone enough to thwart an attack.
Additional material
- Presentation slides: [pdf]