Measurement program: Investigation on cache-timing attack

Abstract

Recent cryptanalysis is able to reduce the strength of a cipher, without breaking the cipher as such, like in traditional cryptographic attacks. This is achieved by obtaining, and subsequently utilizing, some hardware information to recover the secret key or the message, or at least part thereof. This kind of attack is called side channel attack, and has changed the conceptual idea of cryptography from a black box system with a single input and a single output to a complex system, that produces plural, unexpected outputs, the so-called side-channel information in addition to the intended cryptographic output. This additional output can be used to break an implementation of a cipher. Cache-timing is one type of side channel attacks that is mostly done in general purpose computers. In this paper we are investigating cache-timing attacks, and show some experimental results that motivated us to develop a portable measurement program for such attacks. ©2009 IEEE.