A Practical Iterative Side Channel Cube Attack on AES-128/256

Abstract

The Side Channel Cube Attack (SCCA) is a kind of Algebraic Side Channel Attack (ASCA) consisting of theoretical and practical aspects. This paper presents a general framework for the SCCA (called an Iterative SCCA (ISCCA)) on block ciphers in which theoretical and practical aspects are explained and the requirements are listed. On the theoretical side, we use extraction of quadratic equations, recognition of iterated chosen plaintexts, and cube iteration to improve the SCCA on block ciphers. On the experimental side, we define a feasible scenario in which the ISCCA can be applied on block ciphers. Then, we implement the ISCCA on AES and verify the results on an ARM microcontroller. Finally, we compare the proposed SCCA (ISCCA) with the Simple Power Analysis, the previous SCCAs, and the previous attacks on AES. This comparison is based on template building and data, time, and memory complexity. We show that the SCCA can recover 128 and 256 key bits of the AES-128/256 only with data complexity 27.3, time complexity 215.74 and memory complexity 27.89 on AES-128, and data complexity 27.75, time complexity 216.2 and memory complexity 28.21 on AES-256. We show that only nine interesting points are needed for template matching phase. This is the most efficient SCCA on AES-128/256.

Keywords: Side channel, cube attack, AES-128/256, Hamming weight, ·ARM microcontroller