A new model for error-tolerant side-channel cube attacks

Abstract

Side-channel cube attacks are a class of leakage attacks on block ciphers in which the attacker is assumed to have access to some leaked information on the internal state of the cipher as well as the plaintext/ciphertext pairs. The known Dinur-Shamir model and its variants require error-free data for at least part of the measurements. In this paper, we consider a new and more realistic model which can deal with the case when all the leaked bits are noisy. In this model, the key recovery problem is converted to the problem of decoding a binary linear code over a binary symmetric channel with the crossover probability which is determined by the measurement quality and the cube size. We use the maximum likelihood decoding method to recover the key. As a case study, we demonstrate efficient key recovery attacks on PRESENT. We show that the full 80-bit key can be restored with 210.2 measurements with an error probability of 19.4% for each measurement. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.