Leakage-Resilient Authentication and Encryption from Symmetric Cryptographic Primitives

Abstract

Leakage-resilient cryptosystems aim to maintain security in situations where their implementation leaks physical information about their internal secrets. Because of their efficiency and usability on a wide range of platforms, solutions based on symmetric primitives (such as block ciphers) are particularly attractive in this context. So far, the literature has mostly focused on the design of leakage-resilient pseudorandom objects (e.g. PRGs, PRFs, PRPs). In this paper, we consider the complementary and practically important problem of designing secure authentication and encryption schemes. For this purpose, we follow a pragmatic approach based on the advantages and limitations of existing leakage-resilient pseudorandom objects, and rely on the (arguably necessary, yet minimal) use of a leak-free component. The latter can typically be instantiated with a block cipher implementation protected by traditional countermeasures, and we investigate how to combine it with the more intensive use of a much more efficient (less protected) block cipher implementation. Based on these premises, we propose and analyse new constructions of leakage-resilient MAC and encryption schemes, which allow fixing security and efficiency drawbacks of previous proposals in this direction. For encryption, we additionally provide a detailed discussion of why previously proposed (indistinguishability based) security definitions cannot capture actual side-channel attacks, and suggest a relaxed and more realistic way to quantify leakage-resilience in this case, by reducing the security of many iterations of the primitive to the security of a single iteration, independent of the security notion guaranteed by this single iteration (that remains hard to define).