Paper 2014/682

A Unified Formalism for Physical Attacks

Hélène Le Bouder, Ronan Lashermes, Yanis Linge, Bruno Robisson, and Assia Tria

Abstract

The security of cryptographic algorithms can be considered in two contexts. On the one hand, these algorithms can be proven secure mathematically. On the other hand, physical attacks can weaken the implementation of an algorithm yet proven secure. Under the common name of physical attacks, different attacks are regrouped: side channel attacks and fault injection attacks. This paper presents a common formalism for these attacks and highlights their underlying principles. All physical attacks on symmetric algorithms can be described with a 3-step process. Moreover it is possible to compare different physical attacks, by separating the theoretical attack path and the experimental parts of the attacks.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Formalismphysical attacksside channelsfault injections
Contact author(s)
le bouder helene @ orange fr
History
2014-09-03: revised
2014-09-01: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2014/682
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2014/682,
      author = {Hélène Le Bouder and Ronan Lashermes and Yanis Linge and Bruno Robisson and Assia Tria},
      title = {A Unified Formalism for Physical Attacks},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2014/682},
      year = {2014},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/682}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/682}
}
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