Practical Evaluation of FSE 2016 Customized Encoding Countermeasure

Authors

  • Shivam Bhasin Temasek Laboratories, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
  • Dirmanto Jap Temasek Laboratories, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
  • Thomas Peyrin Temasek Laboratories, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13154/tosc.v2017.i3.108-129

Keywords:

side-channel attacks, software countermeasures, customized encoding, block cipher implementation, microcontroller

Abstract

To protect against side-channel attacks, many countermeasures have been proposed. A novel customized encoding countermeasure was published in FSE 2016. Customized encoding exploits knowledge of the profiled leakage of the device to construct an optimal encoding and minimize the overall side-channel leakage. This technique was originally applied on a basic table look-up. In this paper, we implement a full block cipher with customized encoding countermeasure and investigate its security under simulated and practical setting for a general purpose microcontroller. Under simulated setting, we can verify that customized encoding shows strong security properties under proper assumption of leakage estimation and noise variance. However, in practical setting, our general observation is that the side-channel leakage will mostly be present even if the encoding scheme is applied, highlighting some limitation of the approach. The results are supported by experiments on 8-bit AVR and 32-bit ARM microcontroller.

Published

2017-09-19

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Practical Evaluation of FSE 2016 Customized Encoding Countermeasure. (2017). IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology, 2017(3), 108-129. https://doi.org/10.13154/tosc.v2017.i3.108-129