Investigation of Power Analysis Attacks Dr Elisabeth Oswald, Principal Investigator Department of Computer Science University of Bristol Merchant Venturers Building Woodland Road BRISTOL BS8 1UB United Kingdom e-mail

This research project aimed to scrutinize the application and to expand the theory of power analysis attacks. Power analysis attacks allow the extraction of secret information from smart cards and other cryptographic devices. Smart cards are used in many applications including banking, mobile communications, pay TV, and electronic signatures. In all these applications, the security of the smart cards is of crucial importance. The research outcomes of this project relate to the secure implementation of cryptographic algorithms on devices such as smart cards, mobile phones, etc. We pursued three strands of open questions and achieved several interesting and practically relevant results. Firstly, we looked at the applicability of so called template attacks which are considered to be the strongest implementation attacks in an information theoretic sense. We found new ways of utilising such attacks to to for instance mount attacks on devices using less information (e.g. attacks that do not require knowledge of inputs). Secondly we looked at evaluation strategies to assess the security of devices. We found that under certain conditions, the most commonly used side channel attacks are actually equivalent and differences observed in paper relating to practical results are statistical artifacts sometimes related to insufficient experimental setups. Thirdly we investigated the secure implementation of so-called public-key cryptography and put forward some new algorithms.

Researche staff who contributed to this project: Mike Tunstall

Selected publications: