International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

Markus G. Kuhn

Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2023
TCHES
Low Trace-Count Template Attacks on 32-bit Implementations of ASCON AEAD
The recently adopted Ascon standard by NIST offers a lightweight authenticated encryption algorithm for use in resource-constrained cryptographic devices. To help assess side-channel attack risks of Ascon implementations, we present the first template attack based on analyzing power traces, recorded from an STM32F303 microcontroller board running Weatherley’s 32-bit implementations of Ascon-128. Our analysis combines a fragment template attack with belief-propagation and key-enumeration techniques. The main results are three-fold: (1) we reached 100% success rate from a single trace if the C compiler optimized the unmasked implementation for space, (2) the success rate was about 95% after three traces if the compiler optimized instead for time, and (3) we also attacked a masked version, where the success rate was over 90% with 20 traces of executions with the same key, all after enumerating up to 224 key candidates. These results show that suitably-designed template attacks can pose a real threat to Ascon implementations, even if protected by first-order masking, but we also learnt how some differences in programming style, and even compiler optimization settings, can significantly affect the result.
2005
CHES

Program Committees

CHES 2011
CHES 2009
CHES 2008
CHES 2007

Coauthors

Feng Hao (1)
Sumanta Sarkar (1)
Shih-Chun You (1)