Seminar Details
2010-05-18 (14.00) : Towards Leakage-Resilient Cryptographic Devices
At Euler building
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Standaert, François-Xavier
Abstract :
Traditionally, cryptographic algorithms provide security against an adversary who has only black box
access to cryptographic devices. That is, the only thing the adversary can do is to query the
cryptographic algorithm on inputs of its choice and analyze the responses, which are always
computed according to the correct original secret information. However, such a model does not always
correspond to the realities of physical implementations. During the last decade, significant attention
has been paid to the physical security evaluation of cryptographic devices. In particular, it has been
demonstrated that actual attackers may be much more powerful than what is captured by the black box model.
For example, they can actually get a side-channel information, based on the device's physical computational
steps. As a consequence, some kind of obfuscation is required to protect integrated circuits from these
physical attacks. This is especially important for small embedded devices (e.g. smart cards, RFIDs, sensor
networks, ...) that can typically be under and adversary's control for a short period of time. This implies
new theoretical concerns (how to exactly model and evaluate these physical threats) and practical ones
(how to prevent them). In this talk, I will discuss different results in the area of side-channel attacks,
with a particular focus on formal tools that can be used to evaluate physical security on a fair basis.
Starting from an introductive view of the field, I will describe some well known attacks and countermeasures,
present a framework for the analysis of side-channel key-recovery attacks and finally discuss the connection
of this framework with recent works in leakage-resilient cryptography.