Vincent Grosso

Block ciphers that are easier to mask: how far can we go?

The design and analysis of lightweight block ciphers has been a very active research area over the last couple of years, with many innovative proposals trying to optimize different performance figures. However, since these block ciphers are dedicated to low-cost embedded devices, their implementation is also a typical target for side-channel adversaries. As preventing such attacks with countermeasures usually implies significant performance overheads, a natural open problem is to propose new algorithms for which physical security is considered as an optimization criteria, hence allowing better performances again. We tackle this problem by studying how much we can tweak standard block ciphers such as the AES Rijndael in order to allow efficient masking (that is one of the most frequently considered solutions to improve security against side-channel attacks). For this purpose, we first investigate alternative S-boxes and round structures. We show that both approaches can be used separately in order to limit the total number of non-linear operations in the block cipher, hence allowing more efficient masking. We then combine these ideas into a concrete instance of block cipher called Zorro. We further provide a detailed security analysis of this new cipher taking its design specificities into account, leading us to exploit innovative techniques borrowed from hash function cryptanalysis (that are sometimes of independent interest). Eventually, we conclude the paper by evaluating the efficiency of masked Zorro implementations in an 8-bit microcontroller, and exhibit their interesting performance figures.

On the Cost of Lazy Engineering for Masked Software Implementations

Masking is one of the most popular countermeasures to mitigate side-channel analysis. Yet, its deployment in actual cryptographic devices is well known to be challenging, since designers have to ensure that the leakage corresponding to different shares is independent. Several works have shown that such an independent leakage assumption may be contradicted in practice, because of physical effects such as “glitches” or “transition-based” leakages. As a result, implementing masking securely can be a time-consuming engineering problem. This is in strong contrast with recent and promising approaches for the automatic insertion of countermeasures exploiting compilers, that aim to limit the development time of side-channel resistant software. Motivated by this contrast, we question what can be hoped for these approaches – or more generally for masked software implementations based on careless assembly generation. For this purpose, our first contribution is a simple reduction from security proofs obtained in a (usual but not always realistic) model where leakages depend on the intermediate variables manipulated by the target device, to security proofs in a (more realistic) model where the transitions between these intermediate variables are leaked. We show that the cost of moving from one context to the other implies a division of the security order by two for masking schemes. Next, our second and main contribution is to provide a comprehensive empirical validation of this reduction, based on two microcontrollers, several (handwritten and compiler-based) ways of generating assembly codes, with and without “recycling” the randomness used for sharing. These experiments confirm the relevance of our analysis, and therefore quantify the cost of lazy engineering for masking.

LS-Designs: Bitslice Encryption for Efficient Masked Software Implementations

Side-channel analysis is an important issue for the security of embedded cryptographic devices, and masking is one of the most investigated solutions to mitigate such attacks. In this context, efficient masking has recently been considered as a possible criteria for new block cipher designs. Previous proposals in this direction were applicable to different types of masking schemes (e.g. Boolean and polynomial). In this paper, we study possible optimizations when specializing the designs to Boolean masking. For this purpose, we first observe that bitslice ciphers have interesting properties for improving both the efficiency and the regularity of masked software implementations. Next we specify a family of block ciphers (denoted as LS-designs) that can systematically take advantage of bitslicing in a principled manner. Eventually, we evaluate both the security and performance of such designs and two of their instances, confirming excellent properties for physically secure applications.

Low Entropy Masking Schemes, Revisited

Low Entropy Masking Schemes (LEMS) are a recent countermeasure against side-channel attacks. They aim at reducing the randomness requirements of masking schemes under certain (adversarial and implementation) conditions. Previous works have put forward the interest of this approach when such conditions are met. We complement these investigations by analyzing LEMS against adversaries and implementations that deviate from their expected behavior, in a realistic manner. Our conclusions are contrasted: they confirm the theoretical interest of the countermeasure, while suggesting that its exploitation in actual products may be risky, because of hard(er) to control hardware assumptions.

Efficient Masked S-Boxes Processing – A Step Forward –

To defeat side-channel attacks, the implementation of block cipher algorithms in embedded devices must include dedicated countermeasures. To this end, security designers usually apply secret sharing techniques and build masking schemes to securely operate an shared data. The popularity of this approach can be explained by the fact that it enables formal security proofs. The construction of masking schemes thwarting higher-order side-channel attacks, which correspond to a powerful adversary able to exploit the leakage of the different shares, has been a hot topic during the last decade. Several solutions have been proposed, usually at the cost of significant performance overheads. As a result, the quest for efficient masked S-box implementations is still ongoing. In this paper, we focus on the scheme proposed by Carlet et al at FSE 2012, and latter improved by Roy and Vivek at CHES 2013. This scheme is today the most efficient one to secure a generic S-box at any order. By exploiting an idea introduced by Coron et al at FSE 2013, we show that Carlet et al’s scheme can still be improved for S-boxes with input dimension larger than four. We obtain this result thanks to a new definition for the addition-chain exponentiation used during the masked S-box processing. For the AES and DES S-boxes, we show that our improvement leads to significant efficiency gains.

Simpler and More Efficient Rank Estimation for Side-Channel Security Assessment

Rank estimation algorithms allow analyzing the computational security of cryptographic keys for which adversaries have obtained partial information thanks to leakage or cryptanalysis. They are particularly useful in side-channel security evaluations, where the key is known by the evaluator but not reachable with exhaustive search. A first instance of such algorithms has been proposed at Eurocrypt 2013. In this paper, we propose a new tool for rank estimation that is conceptually simpler and much more efficient than this previous proposal. It allows approximating the key rank of (128-bit, 256-bit) symmetric keys with very tight bounds (i.e. with less than one bit of error), almost instantaneously and with limited memory. It also scales nicely to larger (e.g. 1024-bit) key sizes, for which the previous algorithm was hardly applicable.

Simple Key Enumeration (and Rank Estimation) Using Histograms: An Integrated Approach

The main contribution of this paper, is a new key enumeration algorithm that combines the conceptual simplicity of the rank estimation algorithm of Glowacz et al. (from FSE 2015) and the parallelizability of the enumeration algorithm of Bogdanov et al. (SAC 2015) and Martin et al. (from ASIACRYPT 2015). Our new algorithm is based on histograms. It allows obtaining simple bounds on the (small) rounding errors that it introduces and leads to straightforward parallelization. We further show that it can minimize the bandwidth of distributed key testing by selecting parameters that maximize the factorization of the lists of key candidates produced by the enumeration, which can be highly beneficial, e.g. if these tests are performed by a hardware coprocessor. We also put forward that the conceptual simplicity of our algorithm translates into efficient implementations (that slightly improve the state-of-the-art). As an additional consolidating effort, we finally describe an open source implementation of this new enumeration algorithm, combined with the FSE 2015 rank estimation one, that we make available with the paper.

Masking and leakage-resilient primitives: One, the other(s) or both?

Securing cryptographic implementations against side-channel attacks is one of the most important challenges in modern cryptography. Many countermeasures have been introduced for this purpose, and analyzed in specialized security models. Formal solutions have also been proposed to extend the guarantees of provable security to physically observable devices. Masking and leakage-resilient cryptography are probably the most investigated and best understood representatives of these two approaches. Unfortunately, claims whether one, the other or their combination provides better security at lower cost remained vague so far. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive treatment of this important problem. For this purpose, we analyze whether cryptographic implementations can be security-bounded, in the sense that the time complexity of the best side-channel attack is lower-bounded, independent of the number of measurements performed. Doing so, we first put forward a significant difference between stateful primitives such as leakage-resilient PRGs (that easily ensure bounded security), and stateless ones such as leakage-resilient PRFs (that hardly do). We then show that in practice, leakage-resilience alone provides the best security vs. performance tradeoff when bounded security is achievable, while masking alone is the solution of choice otherwise. That is, we highlight that one (x)or the other approach should be privileged, which contradicts the usual intuition that physical security is best obtained by combining countermeasures. Besides, our experimental results underline that despite defined in exactly the same way, the bounded leakage requirement in leakage-resilient PRGs and PRFs imply significantly different challenges for hardware designers. Namely, such a bounded leakage is much harder to guarantee for stateless primitives (like PRFs) than for statefull ones (like PRGs). As a result, constructions of leakage-resilient PRGs and PRFs proven under the same bounded leakage assumption, and instantiated with the same AES implementation, may lead to different practical security levels.

Masking vs. multiparty computation: how large is the gap for AES?

In this paper, we evaluate the performances of state-of-the-art higher order masking schemes for the AES. Doing so, we pay a particular attention to the comparison between specialized solutions introduced exclusively as countermeasures against side-channel analysis, and a recent proposal by Roche and Prouff exploiting multiparty computation (MPC) techniques. We show that the additional security features this latter scheme provides (e.g., its glitch-freeness) come at the cost of large performance overheads. We then study how exploiting standard optimization techniques from the MPC literature can be used to reduce this gap. In particular, we show that “packed secret sharing” based on a modified multiplication algorithm can speed up MPC-based masking when the order of the masking scheme increases. Eventually, we discuss the randomness requirements of masked implementations. For this purpose, we first show with information theoretic arguments that the security guarantees of masking are only preserved if this randomness is uniform, and analyze the consequences of a deviation from this requirement. We then conclude the paper by including the cost of randomness generation in our performance evaluations. These results should help actual designers to choose a masking scheme based on security and performance constraints.

ASCA, SASCA and DPA with Enumeration: Which One Beats the Other and When?

We describe three contributions regarding the Soft Analytical Side-Channel Attacks SASCA introduced at Asiacrypt 2014. First, we compare them with Algebraic Side-Channel Attacks ASCA in a noise-free simulated setting. We observe that SASCA allow more efficient key recoveries than ASCA, even in this context favorable to the latter. Second, we describe the first working experiments of SASCA against an actual AES implementation. Doing so, we analyse their profiling requirements, put forward the significant gains they provide over profiled Differential Power Analysis DPA in terms of number of traces needed for key recoveries, and discuss the specificities of such concrete attacks compared to simulated ones. Third, we evaluate the distance between SASCA and DPA enhanced with computational power to perform enumeration, and show that the gap between both attacks can be quite reduced in this case. Therefore, our results bring interesting feedback for evaluation laboratories. They suggest that in several relevant scenarios e.g. attacks exploiting many known plaintexts, taking a small margin over the security level indicated by standard DPA with enumeration should be sufficient to prevent more elaborate attacks such as SASCA. By contrast, SASCA may remain the only option in more extreme scenarios e.g. attacks with unknown plaintexts/ciphertexts or against leakage-resilient primitives. We conclude by recalling the algorithmic dependency of the latter attacks, and therefore that our conclusions are specific to the AES.