Exploiting small leakages in masks to turn a second-order attack into a first-order attack

Abstract

Masking countermeasures, used to thwart side-channel attacks, have been shown to be vulnerable to mask-extraction attacks. State-of-the-art mask-extraction attacks on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm target S-Box re-computation schemes, but have not been applied to scenarios where S-Boxes are precomputed offline. We propose an attack targeting precomputed S-Boxes stored in nonvolatile memory. Our attack targets AES implemented in software protected by a low entropy masking scheme and recovers the masks with 91% success rate. Recovering the secret key requires fewer power traces (in fact, by at least two orders of magnitude) compared to a classical second order attack. Moreover, we show that this attack remains viable in a noisy environment, or with a reduced number of leakage points.