Unified and optimized linear collision attacks and their application in a non-profiled setting

Abstract

Side-channel collision attacks are one of the most investigated techniques allowing the combination of mathematical and physical cryptanalysis. In this paper, we discuss their relevance in the security evaluation of leaking devices with two main contributions. On the one hand, we suggest that the exploitation of linear collisions in block ciphers can be naturally re-written as a Low Density Parity Check Code decoding problem. By combining this re-writing with a Bayesian extension of the collision detection techniques, we succeed in improving the efficiency and error tolerance of previously introduced attacks. On the other hand, we provide various experiments in order to discuss the practicality of such attacks compared to standard DPA. Our results exhibit that collision attacks are less efficient in classical implementation contexts, e.g. 8-bit microcontrollers leaking according to a linear power consumption model. We also observe that the detection of collisions in software devices may be difficult in the case of optimized implementations, because of less regular assembly codes. Interestingly, the soft decoding approach is particularly useful in these more challenging scenarios. Finally, we show that there exist (theoretical) contexts in which collision attacks succeed in exploiting leakages whereas all other non-profiled side-channel attacks fail. © 2012 International Association for Cryptologic Research.