Group collision attack

Abstract

Key enumeration schemes are used to post-process the scores given by side channel distinguishers and enumerate the key candidates from the most possible one to the least possible one, which can be regarded as optimal tools of key search. However, the application of them is limited by very large key candidate space and computing power consumption. For example, the attacker may spend several weeks or months enumerating the whole 245 key candidates. Unlike the former literature that try to propose a more efficient algorithm to process the distinguishers, scores of key candidates directly, we focus on pre-processing and reducing the key candidate space. To achieve this goal, a new divide and conquer strategy named group collision attack (GCA) is proposed in this paper. The GCA works as follows in brief. The key candidates are first divided into groups on which intra-group collision attack is used to remove the impossible key combinations in each group. Then, the inter-group collision attack is performed to further remove the impossible key combinations between groups. Thus, the complexity of key enumeration is reduced significantly. A series of practical experiments are carried out by using our GCA and the experimental results verify its efficiency.