Power analysis attacks on ARX: An application to Salsa20

Bodhisatwa Mazumdar, Sk Subidh Ali, Ozgur Sinanoglu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the vulnerability of Salsa20 stream cipher against power analysis attacks, especially against correlation power analysis (CPA), which is the strongest form of power analysis attacks. In recent literature, a rigorous study of optimal differential characteristics is presented, but an analysis of the resistance of the cipher against power analysis side-channel attacks remains absent. Our technique targets the three subrounds of the first round of Salsa20. The overall correlation based differential power analysis (DPA) has an attack complexity of 219. From extensive experiments on a reduced area implementation of Salsa20, we demonstrate that two key words k0, k7 of a block in Salsa20 are extremely vulnerable to CPA while a combination of two key words k2, k4 produced a very low success rate of 0.2, which shows a high resilience against correlation-analysis DPA. This varying resilience of the key words towards correlation-analysis DPA has not been observed in any stream or block cipher in present literature, which makes the architecture of this stream cipher interesting from the side-channel analysis perspective.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 21st IEEE International On-Line Testing Symposium, IOLTS 2015
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages40-43
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781467379045
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 28 2015
Event21st IEEE International On-Line Testing Symposium, IOLTS 2015 - Elia, Halkidiki, Greece
Duration: Jul 6 2015Jul 8 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 21st IEEE International On-Line Testing Symposium, IOLTS 2015

Other

Other21st IEEE International On-Line Testing Symposium, IOLTS 2015
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityElia, Halkidiki
Period7/6/157/8/15

Keywords

  • ARX
  • Correlation Analysis DPA
  • Differential Power Analysis
  • Hamming Weight
  • Salsa20
  • Success Rate

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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