Higher-Order DCA Attacks on White-Box Implementations with Masking and Shuffling Countermeasures

Abstract

On white-box implementations, it has been proven that differential computation analysis (DCA) can recover secret keys without time-costly reverse engineering. At CHES 2021, Seker et al. combined linear and non-linear masking protections (SEL masking) to prevent sensitive variables from being predicted by DCA. At Eurocrypt 2021, Biryukov and Udovenko introduced a public dummy shuffling construction (BU shuffling) to protect sensitive functions. In this paper, we extend higher-order DCA (HO-DCA) to higher-degree context for exploiting the vulnerabilities against the state-of-the-art countermeasures. The data-dependency HO-DCA (DDHO-DCA), which is proposed at CHES 2020, is improved to successfully recover the correct key of SEL masking. In specific, our improved DDHO-DCA can also enhance the attack result of #100 which is the third winning challenge in WhibOx 2019. Since the XOR phase plays the same role as linear masking, we prove that a specific BU shuffling is vulnerable to HO-DCA attacks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the combination of SEL masking and the specific BU shuffling still cannot defeat our higher-degree HO-DCA and improved DDHO-DCA attacks.

Keywords

• White-box Implementation
• Masking
• Dummy Shuffling
• Higher-order DCA
• Data-dependency Attack