On the Simplicity of Converting Leakages from Multivariate to Univariate

Several masking schemes to protect cryptographic implementations against side-channel attacks have been proposed. A few considered the glitches, and provided security proofs in presence of such inherent phenomena happening in logic circuits. One which is based on multi-party computation protocols and utilizes Shamir’s secret sharing scheme was presented at CHES 2011. It aims at providing security for hardware implementations – mainly of AES – against those sophisticated side-channel attacks that also take glitches into account. One part of this article deals with the practical issues and relevance of the aforementioned masking scheme. Following the recommendations given in the extended version of the mentioned article, we first provide a guideline on how to implement the scheme for the simplest settings. Constructing an exemplary design of the scheme, we provide practical side-channel evaluations based on a Virtex-5 FPGA. Our results demonstrate that the implemented scheme is indeed secure against univariate power analysis attacks given a basic measurement setup. In the second part of this paper we show how using very simple changes in the measurement setup opens the possibility to exploit multivariate leakages while still performing a univariate attack. Using these techniques the scheme under evaluation can be defeated using only a moderate number of measurements. This is applicable not only to the scheme showcased here, but also to most other known masking schemes where the shares of sensitive values are processed in adjacent clock cycles.