On studying Whitenoise stream-cipher against Power Analysis Attacks
Date
2012-12-17
Authors
Zakeri, Babak
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Abstract
This report describes the works done since May 2010 to December 2012 on breaking Whitenoise encryption algorithm. It is mainly divided into two sections: Studying the stream-cipher developed by Whitenoise lab and its implementation on a FPGA against certain group of indirect attacks called Power Analysis Attacks, and reviewing the process of development and results of experiments applied on a power sampling board which was developed during this project. For the first part the algorithm and the implementation would be reverse engineered and reviewed. Various blocks of the implementation would be studied one by one against some indirect attacks. It would be shown that those attacks are useless or at least very weak against Whitenoise. A new scenario would then be proposed to attack the implementation. An improvement to the new scenario would also be presented to completely hack the implementation. However it would also be shown that the complete hack requires very accurate equipment, large number of computations and applying a lot of tests and thus Whitenoise seems fairly strong against this specific group of attacks. In the next section the requirements of a power consumption measurement setup would be discussed. Then the motivations and goals of building such a board would be mentioned. Some important concepts and consideration in building the board, such as schematic of the amplifier, multilayer designing, embedding a BGA component, star grounding, inductance reduction, and other concepts would be presented. Then the results of applied tests on the produced board would be discussed. The precision of the measurements, some pattern recognition along with some other results would be illustrated. Also some important characteristics such as linearity of measurements would be investigated and proved to exist. In the end some topics as possible future works, such as more pattern recognition, or observing the effect of masks on the power consumption would be suggested.
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Keywords
Whitenoise, Power Analysis Attacks, Stream Cipher, Power Sampling Board, FPGA, Cryptography