Power analysis attack and countermeasure on the Rabbit Stream Cipher (position paper)

Abstract

Recently, there has been extensive research on mobile devices and stream cipher to increase security. The Rabbit stream cipher was selected for the final eSTREAM portfolio organized by EU ECRYPT and as one of algorithms of the ISO/IEC 18033-4 Stream Ciphers on ISO Security Standardization. As the Rabbit evaluated the complexity of side-channel analysis attack as 'medium' in a theoretical approach, the method of correlation power analysis attack and the feasibility of a practical power analysis attack in the experiments are described in this paper. We also propose a countermeasure with random masking and hiding schemes for linear operation. We construct the algorithm of the countermeasure with an additional operating time of 24% with 12.3% increased memory requirements to maintain high-speed performance. We use an eight-bit RISC AVR microprocessor (ATmega 128L) to implement our methods to show that the proposed method is secure against correlation power analysis attacks in practical experiments.