Be My Guess: Guessing Entropy vs. Success Rate for Evaluating Side-Channel Attacks of Secure Chips

Julien Béguinot, Wei Cheng, Sylvain Guilley, Olivier Rioul · 2022 25th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD) · 2022

In a theoretical context of side-channel attacks, optimal bounds between success rate and guessing entropy are derived with a simple majorization (Schur-concavity) argument. They are further theoretically refined for different versions of the classical Hamming weight leakage model, in particular assuming a priori equiprobable secret keys and additive white Gaussian measurement noise. Closed-form expressions and numerical computation are given. A study of the impact of the choice of the substitution box with respect to side-channel resistance reveals that its nonlinearity tends to homogenize the expressivity of success rate and guessing entropy. The intriguing approximate relation$GE=1/SR$is observed in the case of 8-bit bytes and low noise.

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