Crypto - News

Side Channel Cryptanalysis is a new research area of Applied Cryptography that has gained more and more interest since the mid nineties. The research in this area shows that the (unintended) leakage caused by a 'straight-forward' implementation of a secure mathematical algorithm can be sufficient to extract secret key material. The efforts needed for these passive implementation attacks are relatively low. On the other side, it turned out that the development of effective countermeasures is not a trivial task. Related implementation attacks are Fault Analysis scenarios, which are active attacks that aim to cause (forced) leakage. Side Channel Cryptanalysis and Fault Analysis are definitively of practical importance for the development of secure products.
Note, that a developer of a secure product has to defend the product against all possible attack paths. An attacker is better off: the identification of one serious vulnerability can be sufficient to jeopardise the security policy.
It is important to stress that the mathematical security of the cryptographic algorithms attacked is not being questioned by Side Channel Cryptanalysis and Fault Analysis. It is the implementation of these algorithms that is at risk to be broken.
In this lounge, we aim to give an introduction to this research area and to categorise and collect the current knowledge.

The Side Channel Cryptanalysis Lounge is provided by the ECRYPT Network of Excellence (http://www.ecrypt.eu.org). It is maintained by the virtual lab VAMPIRE.

Autor: JP