Abstract
Public knowledge about the structure of a cryptographic system is a standard assumption in the literature and algorithms are expected to guarantee security in a setting where only the encryption key is kept secret. Nevertheless, undisclosed proprietary cryptographic algorithms still find widespread use in applications both in the civil and military domains. Even though side-channel-based reverse engineering attacks that recover the hidden components of custom cryptosystems have been demonstrated for a wide range of constructions, the complete and practical reverse engineering of AES-128-like ciphers remains unattempted.
In this work, we close this gap and propose the first practical reverse engineering of AES-128-like custom ciphers, i.e., algorithms that deploy undisclosed SubBytes, ShiftRows and MixColumns functions. By performing a side-channel-assisted differential power analysis, we show that the amount of traces required to fully recover the undisclosed components are relatively small, hence the possibility of a side-channel attack remains as a practical threat. The results apply to both 8-bit and 32-bit architectures and were validated on two common microcontroller platforms.
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Notes
- 1.
For the remainder of this text, we assume that a signal \(\overline{E}(b_{i,F(j)})\) corresponds to a plaintext p, while \(\overline{E}(b'_{i,F(j)})\) refers to \(p'\).
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Thomas Roche for helping us improve this paper. Fatih Balli and Subhadeep Banik are supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through the Ambizione Grant PZ00P2_179921.
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A Supplementary Plots
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Differential power traces \(\overline{E}(b_{l,\mathsf {SB}(0)})\) - \(\overline{E}(b'_{l,\mathsf {SB}(0)})\) on the 8-bit ATXMEGA128D4 platform for different active state columns.
Differential power traces \(\overline{E}(b_{i,\mathsf {AK}(1)})\) - \(\overline{E}(b'_{i,\mathsf {AK}(1)})\) for \(0 \le i \le 3\) on the 32-bit STM32F303 platform with a single inactive byte in the first column.
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Caforio, A., Balli, F., Banik, S. (2022). Complete Practical Side-Channel-Assisted Reverse Engineering of AES-Like Ciphers. In: Grosso, V., Pöppelmann, T. (eds) Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications. CARDIS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97348-3_6
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