Paper 2013/770
Efficient Template Attacks
Omar Choudary and Markus G. Kuhn
Abstract
Template attacks remain a powerful side-channel technique to eavesdrop on tamper-resistant hardware. They model the probability distribution of leaking signals and noise to guide a search for secret data values. In practice, several numerical obstacles can arise when implementing such attacks with multivariate normal distributions. We propose efficient methods to avoid these. We also demonstrate how to achieve significant performance improvements, both in terms of information extracted and computational cost, by pooling covariance estimates across all data values. We provide a detailed and systematic overview of many different options for implementing such attacks. Our experimental evaluation of all these methods based on measuring the supply current of a byte-load instruction executed in an unprotected 8-bit microcontroller leads to practical guidance for choosing an attack algorithm.
Note: Updated version, including conclusions section which was missing in the previous submission.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Implementation
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Minor revision. CARDIS 2013
- Keywords
- side-channel analysistemplate attackfair evaluation
- Contact author(s)
- omar choudary @ cl cam ac uk
- History
- 2015-11-10: last of 3 revisions
- 2013-11-25: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2013/770
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2013/770,
author = {Omar Choudary and Markus G. Kuhn},
title = {Efficient Template Attacks},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2013/770},
year = {2013},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/770}
}