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Not so Difficult in the End: Breaking the Lookup Table-Based Affine Masking Scheme

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Selected Areas in Cryptography – SAC 2023 (SAC 2023)

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Abstract

The lookup table-based masking countermeasure is prevalent in real-world applications due to its potent resistance against side-channel attacks and low computational cost. The ASCADv2 dataset, for instance, ranks among the most secure publicly available datasets today due to two layers of countermeasures: lookup table-based affine masking and shuffling. Current attack approaches rely on strong assumptions. In addition to requiring access to the source code, an adversary would also need prior knowledge of random shares.

This paper forgoes reliance on such knowledge and proposes two attack approaches based on the vulnerabilities of the lookup table-based affine masking implementation. As a result, the first attack can retrieve all secret keys’ reliance in less than a minute without knowing mask shares. Although the second attack is not entirely successful in recovering all keys, we believe more traces would help make such an attack fully functional.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is important to note that subkey candidates can involve guessing any number of bits. Although we assume the AES cipher here, the concept remains algorithm-independent.

  2. 2.

    The proposed attack target the intermediate data when \(\beta =r_{in}\) and \(\beta =r_{out}\).

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/ANSSI-FR/ASCAD/tree/master/STM32_AES_v2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Lichao Wu & Stjepan Picek

  2. Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Guilherme Perin

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  1. Lichao Wu
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Correspondence to Stjepan Picek .

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  1. University Paris 8, Paris, France

    Claude Carlet

  2. University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada

    Kalikinkar Mandal

  3. University of Leuven and University of Bergen, Heverlee, Belgium

    Vincent Rijmen

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Wu, L., Perin, G., Picek, S. (2024). Not so Difficult in the End: Breaking the Lookup Table-Based Affine Masking Scheme. In: Carlet, C., Mandal, K., Rijmen, V. (eds) Selected Areas in Cryptography – SAC 2023. SAC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14201. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53368-6_5

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