Defeating State-of-the-Art White-Box Countermeasures with Advanced Gray-Box Attacks

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 d...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Louis Goubin, Matthieu Rivain, Junwei Wang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Ruhr-Universität Bochum 2020-06-01
Series:Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
Subjects:
Online Access:https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/8597
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:2569-2925