International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 25 November 2013

Omar Choudary, Markus G. Kuhn
ePrint Report ePrint Report
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.

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