Date of Award

9-13-2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Rusty O. Baldwin, PhD.

Abstract

Side-channel analysis (SCA) is a threat to many modern cryptosystems. Many countermeasures exist, but are costly to implement and still do not provide complete protection against SCA. A plausible alternative is to design the cryptosystem using architectures that are known to leak little information about the cryptosystem's operations. This research uses several common primitive architectures for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and assesses the susceptibility of the full AES system to side-channel attack for various primitive configurations. A combined encryption/decryption core is also evaluated to determine if variation of high-level architectures affects leakage characteristics. These different configurations are evaluated under multiple measurement types and leakage models. The results show that different hardware configurations do impact the amount of information leaked by a device, but none of the tested configurations are able to prevent exploitation.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GCO-ENG-12-25

DTIC Accession Number

ADA568668

Share

COinS