Systematic Use of Random Self-Reducibility against Physical Attacks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new black-box, software-based countermeasure leveraging random self-reducibility to protect cryptographic operations against power side-channel and fault-injection attacks, demonstrating significant security improvements.

Contribution

It presents a novel, operation-level countermeasure based on random self-reducibility that is applicable to various algorithms and effectively mitigates physical attacks.

Findings

Reduced power side-channel leakage by two orders of magnitude.

Decreased fault injection success rate by 95.4%.

Successfully applied to RSA-CRT and Kyber cryptosystems.

Abstract

This work presents a novel, black-box software-based countermeasure against physical attacks including power side-channel and fault-injection attacks. The approach uses the concept of random self-reducibility and self-correctness to add randomness and redundancy in the execution for protection. Our approach is at the operation level, is not algorithm-specific, and thus, can be applied for protecting a wide range of algorithms. The countermeasure is empirically evaluated against attacks over operations like modular exponentiation, modular multiplication, polynomial multiplication, and number theoretic transforms. An end-to-end implementation of this countermeasure is demonstrated for RSA-CRT signature algorithm and Kyber Key Generation public key cryptosystems. The countermeasure reduced the power side-channel leakage by two orders of magnitude, to an acceptably secure level in TVLA analysis. For fault injection, the countermeasure reduces the number of faults to 95.4% in average.