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International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology

ICISC 2018: Information Security and Cryptology – ICISC 2018 pp 325–340Cite as

Practical Algebraic Side-Channel Attacks Against ACORN

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11396))

Abstract

The authenticated cipher ACORN is one of the two finalists of the CAESAR competition and is intended for lightweight applications. Because such use cases require protection against physical attacks, several works have been undertaken to achieve secure implementations. Although dedicated threshold and masked schemes have been proposed, no practical side-channel attack against ACORN has been published in the literature yet. It has been theoretically demonstrated that ACORN is vulnerable against differential power analysis but the feasibility of the attack has not been validated in a practical manner. This paper details the results obtained when putting the attack into practice against a software implementation running on a 32-bit micro-controller. Especially, these practical results led us to propose two optimizations of the reference attack: one that requires less knowledge of initial vectors and another one that is less prone to errors and requires fewer acquisitions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Trusted Objects, Aix-en-Provence, France

    Alexandre Adomnicai & Laurent Masson

  2. Mines Saint-Étienne, CEA-Tech, Centre CMP, Gardanne, France

    Alexandre Adomnicai

  3. Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CEA-LETI, DSYS, Grenoble, France

    Jacques J. A. Fournier

Authors
  1. Alexandre Adomnicai
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  2. Laurent Masson
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  3. Jacques J. A. Fournier
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexandre Adomnicai .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Sejong University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Kwangsu Lee

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Adomnicai, A., Masson, L., Fournier, J.J.A. (2019). Practical Algebraic Side-Channel Attacks Against ACORN. In: Lee, K. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology – ICISC 2018. ICISC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11396. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12146-4_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12146-4_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-12145-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-12146-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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