Analysis of Side-Channel Attack Based on Information Theory
Hiroaki Mizuno, Keisuke Iwai, Hidema Tanaka, Takakazu Kurokawa · IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics Communications and Computer Sciences · 2014
This paper presents a new information-theoretical evaluation method, for the resistance of cryptographic implementation against side-channel attacks. In conventional methods, the results of actual attacks have been often used empirically. However, these experimental methods have some problems. In the proposed method, a side-channel attack is regarded as a communication channel model. Then, a new evaluation index “the amount of leakage information” can be defined. The upper-bound of this index is estimated as the channel capacity. The proposed evaluation using this index can avoid the problems of conventional methods. Consequently, the proposed method provides some benefits: (1) It provides rationale for evaluation; (2) It enables execution of numerical evaluation and mutual evaluation among several kinds of countermeasures. This research achieves a unification of evaluation indexes for resistance against side-channel attack. This paper applies the proposed method to correlation power analysis against implementations of stream cipher Enocoro-128 v2. As a result, we confirmed its effectiveness.