On the Security of Partially Masked Software Implementations

Alessandro Barenghi, Gerardo Pelosi

2014

Abstract

Providing sound countermeasures against passive side channel attacks has received large interest in open literature. The scheme proposed in [Ishai et al., 2003] secures a computation against a d-probing adversary splitting it into d+1 shares, albeit with a significant performance overhead (5x to 20x). We maintain that it is possible to apply such countermeasures only to a portion of the cipher implementation, retaining the same computational security, backing a widespread intuition present among practitioners. We provide the sketch of a computationally bound attacker model, adapted as an extension of the one in [Ishai et al., 2003], and detail the resistance metric employed to estimate the computational effort of such an attacker, under sensible assumptions on the characteristic of the device leakage (which is, to the current state of the art, still lacking a complete formalization).

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Barenghi A. and Pelosi G. (2014). On the Security of Partially Masked Software Implementations . In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2014) ISBN 978-989-758-045-1, pages 492-499. DOI: 10.5220/0005120504920499

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt14,
author={Alessandro Barenghi and Gerardo Pelosi},
title={On the Security of Partially Masked Software Implementations},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2014)},
year={2014},
pages={492-499},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005120504920499},
isbn={978-989-758-045-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2014)
TI - On the Security of Partially Masked Software Implementations
SN - 978-989-758-045-1
AU - Barenghi A.
AU - Pelosi G.
PY - 2014
SP - 492
EP - 499
DO - 10.5220/0005120504920499