Christophe Petit
Side-channel and fault attacks and countermeasures
How to break secure schemes: physical attacks
Contribution and perspectives
How to break secure schemes: physical attacks
When a computer, a smart card or a RFID tag executes a cryptographic protocol, it manipulates secret keys.
The physical components used to make these computation are not perfect, and it may for example turn out that computing 1 XOR 1 requires slightly more energy than computing 0 XOR 0.
If the computation is not done carefully, the computation time, the power consumption or electromagnetic radiations can help infer some information about the secret keys and eventually to recover them entirely.
Another physical way to recover some partial information on secret keys is to induce faults during the computation, for example by altering a memory block with a light flash.
Since the discovery of side-channel attacks [KJJ98], the research community has alternatively proposed new countermeasures and new attacks.
Countermeasures proposed have been at the physical level or at the algorithmic level.
A more radical approach to prevent side-channel attacks is to change the algorithms used in practice today, since they were not designed with side-channel attacks in mind.
Following my colleague François-Xavier Standaert at UCL, most of my work in this area has been in that direction.
If you want to know more on side-channels, I would strongly recommend you to have a look at his webpage.
Contributions
Here are my papers and talks that are related to side-channel or faut attacks and countermeasures. Your questions/comments are welcome!
Masking with Randomized Look Up Tables (Towards Preventing Side-Channel Attacks of All)
François-Xavier Standaert, Christophe Petit, Nicolas Veyrat-Charvillon
Cryptography and Security: From Theory to Applications - Essays Dedicated to Jean-Jacques Quisquater on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday.
Paper.
Fresh Re-Keying II: Securing Multiple Parties against Side-Channel and Fault Attacks
Marcel Medwed, Christophe Petit, Francesco Regazzoni, Mathieu Renauld, and François-Xavier Standaert
CARDIS 2011 - 10th Smart Card Research and Advanced Application Conference
Paper.
Fault Attacks on Public Key Elements: Application to DLP based Schemes
Chong Hee Kim, Philippe Bulens, Christophe Petit, and Jean-Jacques Quisquater
EUROPKI 2008 - Fifth European PKI Workshop
Paper.
Slides.
A Block Cipher based Pseudo Random Number Generator Secure Against Side-Channel Key Recovery
Christophe Petit, François-Xavier Standaert, Olivier Pereira, Tal G. Malkin, Moti Yung
ASIACCS'08 - ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security
Paper. Slides.