First-Order Side-Channel Attacks on the Permutation Tables Countermeasure

The use of random permutation tables as a side-channel attack countermeasure was recently proposed by Coron [6]. The countermeasure operates by ensuring that during the execution of an algorithm, each intermediate variable that is handled is in a permuted form described by the random permutation tables. In this paper, we examine the application of this countermeasure to the AES algorithm as described in [6], and show that certain operations admit first-order side-channel leakage. New side-channel attacks are developed to exploit these flaws, using correlation-based and mutual information-based methods. The attacks have been verified in simulation, and in practice on a smart card.