Open AccessDefeating State-of-the-Art White-Box Countermeasures with Advanced Gray-Box Attacks
Author(s) -
Louis Goubin,
Matthieu Rivain,
Junwei Wang
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
iacr transactions on cryptographic hardware and embedded systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2569-2925
DOI - 10.46586/tches.v2020.i3.454-482
Subject(s) - white box , s box , cryptography , computer science , gray (unit) , exploit , computer security , black box , artificial intelligence , block cipher , software engineering , medicine , radiology
The goal of white-box cryptography is to protect secret keys embedded in a cryptographic software deployed in an untrusted environment. In this article, we revisit state-of-the-art countermeasures employed in white-box cryptography, and we discuss possible ways to combine them. Then we analyze the different gray-box attack paths and study their performances in terms of required traces and computation time. Afterward, we propose a new paradigm for the gray-box attack against white-box cryptography, which exploits the data-dependency of the target implementation. We demonstrate that our approach provides substantial complexity improvements over the existing attacks. Finally, we showcase this new technique by breaking the three winning AES-128 white-box implementations from WhibOx 2019 white-box cryptography competition.