A Framework for Shannon Ciphers under Side-Channel Attacks: a Strong Converse and More

Abstract

We are interested in investigating the security of source encryption with a symmetric key under side-channel attacks. In this paper, we propose a general framework of source encryption with a symmetric key under the side-channel attacks, which applies to any source encryption with a symmetric key and any kind of side-channel attacks targeting the secret key. We also propose a new security criterion for strong secrecy under side-channel attacks, which is a natural extension of mutual information, i.e., the maximum conditional mutual information between the plaintext and the ciphertext given the adversarial key leakage, where the maximum is taken over all possible plaintext distribution. Under this new criterion, we successfully formulate the rate region, which serves as both necessary and sufficient conditions to have secure transmission even under side-channel attacks. Furthermore, we also prove another theoretical result on our new security criterion, which might be interesting in its own right: in the case of the discrete memoryless source, no perfect secrecy under side-channel attacks in the standard security criterion, i.e., the ordinary mutual information, is achievable without achieving perfect secrecy in this new security criterion, although our new security criterion is more strict than the standard security criterion.