MACM: How to Reduce the Multi-Round SCA to the Single-Round Attack on the Feistel-SP Networks

Abstract

Since the master key length becomes longer and longer in ciphers, an adversary often needs to preform the multi-round side channel analysis (SCA) in order to recover the master key by enough round keys. Traditional multi-round SCA is launched by adaptive manner in practice, which means that the input of each round is calculated in an on-the-fly way based on all round keys of anterior rounds. However, compared to the classical single-round SCA, the multi-round SCA in adaptive manner is severely limited in several practical scenarios, because all round keys of anterior rounds must be properly recovered before the attack against the next round. In this paper, we focus on the Feistel-SP networks, break the interdependency between the alternating measurement and analysis phases, propose a Multi-round non-Adaptive Chosen Message (MACM) approach, which can reduce the multi-round SCA to the single-round attack. In MACM, the set of plaintexts applied to multiple rounds is calculated in an off-line way. We also prove that the revealed round keys by MACM are adequate to recover the master key. Furthermore, we carefully analyze the advantages of MACM regarding to robustness and compatibility. In order to further manifest the validity of MACM, we perform extensive experiments on three typical Feistel-SP ciphers, Camellia, CLEFIA and SM4, the master keys are recovered as expected, and the number of traces in MACM is at least 25% less than that in the adaptive manner.