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Use of simulators for side-channel analysis: Leakage detection and analysis of cryptographic systems in early stages of development

par Veshchikov, Nikita
Président du jury Roggeman, Yves
Promoteur Markowitch, Olivier
Co-Promoteur Robert, Frédéric
Publication Non publié, 2017-08-23

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

Cryptography is the foundation of modern IT security,it provides algorithms and protocols that can be usedfor secure communications. Cryptographic algorithmsensure properties such as confidentiality and data integrity.Confidentiality can be ensured using encryption algorithms.Encryption algorithms require a secret information called a key.These algorithms are implemented in cryptographic devices.There exist many types of attacks against such cryptosystems,the main goal of these attacks is the extraction of the secret key.Side-channel attacks are among the strongest types of attacksagainst cryptosystems. Side-channel attacks focus on the attacked device, they measure its physicalproperties in order to extract the secret key. Thus, these attacks targetweaknesses in an implementation of an algorithm rather than the abstract algorithm itself.Power analysis is a type of side-channel attacks that can be used to extract a secretkey from a cryptosystem through the analysis of its power consumption whilethe target device executes an encryption algorithm. We can say that the secret information is leaking from the device through itspower consumption. One of the biggest challenges in the domain of side-channel analysisis the evaluation of a device from the perspective of side-channel attacksor in other words the detection of information leakage.A device can be subject to several sources of information leakageand it is actually relatively easy to find just one side-channel attack that works(by exploiting just one source of leakage),however it is very difficult to find all sources of information leakage or to show that there is no information leakage in the givenimplementation of an encryption algorithm. Evaluators use various statistical tests during the analysis of a cryptographic device to checkthat it does not leak the secret key. However, in order to performsuch tests the evaluation lab needs the device to acquire the measurementsand analyse them. Unfortunately, the development process of cryptographicsystems is rather long and has to go through several stages. Thus, an information leakagethat can lead to a side-channel attackcan be discovered by an evaluation lab at the very last stage using the finalproduct. In such case, the whole process has to be restarted in order to fix the issue,this can lead to significant time and budget overheads. The rationale is that developers of cryptographic systems would like to be able to detect issues related to side-channel analysis during the development of the system,preferably on the early stages of its development. However, it is far from beinga trivial task because the end product is not yet available andthe nature of side-channel attacks is such that it exploits the properties ofthe final version of the cryptographic device that is actually available to the end user. The goal of this work is to show how simulators can be used for the detection of issues related to side-channel analysis during the development of cryptosystems.This work lists the advantages of simulators compared to physical experimentsand suggests a classification of simulators for side-channel analysis.This work presents existing simulators that were created for side-channel analysis,more specifically we show that there is a lack of available simulation toolsand that therefore simulators are rarely used in the domain. We present threenew open-source simulators called Silk, Ascold and Savrasca.These simulators are working at different levels of abstraction,they can be used by developers to perform side-channel analysisof the device during different stages of development of a cryptosystem.We show how Silk can be used during the preliminary analysisand development of cryptographic algorithms using simulations based on high level of abstraction source code. We used it to compare S-boxesas well as to compare shuffling countermeasures against side-channel analysis.Then, we present the tool called Ascold that can be used to find side-channel leakagein implementations with masking countermeasure using the analysis of assembly code of the encryption.Finally, we demonstrate how our simulator called Savrasca can be used to find side-channelleakage using simulations based on compiled executable binaries. We use Savrascato analyse masked implementation of a well-known contest on side-channel analysis (the 4th edition of DPA Contest),as a result we demonstrate that the analysed implementation contains a previouslyundiscovered information leakage. Through this work we alsocompared results of our simulated experiments with real experiments comingfrom implementations on microcontrollers and showed that issues found using our simulatorsare also present in the final product. Overall, this work emphasises that simulatorsare very useful for the detection of side-channel leakages in early stages of developmentof cryptographic systems.