Probing attack of share-serial threshold implementation of advanced encryption standard

• Published in: Electronics letters Vol. 55; no. 9; pp. 517 - 519
• Main Authors: Sugawara, T, Li, Y, Sakiyama, K
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Institution of Engineering and Technology 01.05.2019
• Subjects: block cipher AES; Circuits and systems; cryptography; probing attack; share‐serial threshold implementation; side‐channel attack countermeasure; single probe; unified circuit; side-channel attack countermeasure; probing attack; share-serial threshold implementation; unified circuit; cryptography; single probe; block cipher AES
• ISSN: 0013-5194; 1350-911X; 1350-911X
• DOI: 10.1049/el.2018.7518

The authors present the first security evaluation of the side-channel attack countermeasure called the share-serial threshold implementation proposed by Wegener and Moradi. In the share-serial threshold implementation, all the component functions are processed using a unified circuit thereby reducing total circuit area. They show that the share-serial threshold implementation is vulnerable to probing attack using a single probe. In the proposed attack, an attacker places a single probe on a wire in the unified circuit and read the target wire over multiple cycles. The attacker can recover unshared 1-bit intermediate value by combining the measured data. The attack highlights an interesting difference between side-channel analysis and probing attack. The authors also evaluate the number of cipher calls to attack the block cipher advanced encryption standard (AES).