Introduction to side-channel cryptanalysis (and some recent results) – Francois-Xavier Standaert – 8.11.16

Abstract

Side-channel cryptanalysis is a new research area in applied cryptography that has gained more and more interest since the mid-nineties. It considers adversaries trying to take advantage of the physical specificities of actual cryptographic devices. These implementation-specific attacks frequently turn out to be much more efficient than the best known cryptanalytic attacks against the underlying primitive seen as an idealized object. As a result, they are considered very seriously by developers of embedded security devices such as smart cards. In this talk, I will introduce the topic with illustrative examples of attacks, motivate their relevance to actual application scenarios and put forward a number of practical challenges related to their implementation. If time allows, I will also discuss possible countermeasures and some recent results in the field.

Biography

Francois-Xavier Standaert received an Electrical Engineering degree and PhD degree from the Universite catholique de Louvain, respectively in June 2001 and June 2004. In 2004-2005, he was a Fulbright visiting researcher at Columbia University, Department of Computer Science, Network Security Lab and at the MIT Medialab, Center for Bits and Atoms. In March 2006, he was a founding member of IntoPix s.a. From 2005 to 2008, he was a post-doctoral researcher of the UCL Crypto Group and a regular visitor of the two aforementioned laboratories. Since September 2008, he is associate researcher of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) and professor at the UCL Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics (ICTEAM). In 2010, he was program co-chair of CHES (IACR’s flagship workshop on cryptographic hardware). In June 2011, he has been awarded a Starting Independent Research Grant by the European Research Council. His research interests include digital electronics, FPGAs and cryptographic hardware, low power implementations for constrained environments (RFIDs, sensor networks, …), the design and cryptanalysis of symmetric cryptographic primitives, physical security issues in general and side-channel analysis in particular.