Paper 2007/356 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2007/356 ↗

A Block Cipher based PRNG Secure Against Side-Channel Key Recovery

Abstract

We study the security of a block cipher-based pseudorandom number generator, both in the black box world and in the physical world, separately. We first show that the construction is a secure PRNG in the ideal cipher model. Then, we demonstrate its security against a Bayesian side-channel key recovery adversary. As a main result, we show that our construction guarantees that the success rate of the adversary does not increase with the number of physical observations, but in a limited and controlled way. Besides, we observe that, under common assumptions on side-channel attack strategies, increasing the security parameter (typically the block cipher key size) by a polynomial factor involves an increase of a side-channel attack complexity by an exponential factor, making the probability of a successful attack negligible. We believe this work provides a first interesting example of the way the algorithmic design of a cryptographic scheme influences its side-channel resistance.