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Presenter: Babak Zakeri
Supervisor: Dr. Mihai Sima

Date: Fri, December 7, 2012
Time: 11:00:00 - 00:00:00
Place: EOW 430

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT:

Since early works of Paul Kocher in late 90s, it became obvious that encryption algorithms, no matter how strong they are in theory, are vulnerable when implemented because of various forms of leakage. This leakage can be in the form of electromagnetic emissions or power consumption of the device. These new forms of attacks are named indirect attacks and, by comparison to direct attacks that use algebraic and computational methods against the algorithm itself, they target the implementation of the algorithm. Indirect attacks are an emerging topic in the field of cryptography.

In the challenge of finding an algorithm that is resistant both to direct and indirect attacks, Whitenoise Labs has proposed a new stream-cipher. The concept behind the algorithm is straightforward, and it can be implemented using HDL languages. Some previous works have shown that Whitenoise is resistant to direct attacks, but no work has been done on examining its strength against indirect attacks.

In this presentation we discuss the robustness of the Whitenoise algorithm implementation against one group of indirect attacks, the Power Analysis Attacks. We first introduce Whitenoise algorithm and present the reverse engineered block diagram of its implementation. Then we briefly describe the methods of modeling the power, and we introduce some common attack methods, namely the Differential Power Analysis Attacks and Template Attacks. We then show that these methods are either not useful against Whitenoise or are very weak. We propose a new scenario based on power consumption to build an attack against the implementation. It would be shown that this method is capable of finding the secret values of the implementation.