Paper 2012/084 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2012/084 ↗

Improved Algebraic Side-Channel Attack on AES

Abstract

In this paper we present improvements of the algebraic side- channel analysis of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) proposed in [9]. In particular, we optimize the algebraic representation of AES and the algebraic representation of the obtained side-channel information in order to speed up the attack and increase the success rate. We study the performance of our improvements in both known and unknown plain-text/ciphertext attack scenarios. Our experiments indicate that in both cases the amount of required side-channel information is less than the one required in the attacks introduced in [9]. Furthermore, we introduce a method for error handling, which allows our improved algebraic side-channel attack to escape the assumption of an error-free measurement and thus become applicable in practice. We demonstrate the practical use of our improved algebraic side-channel attack by inserting predictions from a single-trace template attack.