Cache-timing attacks without a profiling phase

Authors

ALİ CAN ATICI
CEMAL YILMAZ
ERKAY SAVAŞ

DOI

10.3906/elk-1711-359

Abstract

Theoretically secure cryptographic algorithms can be vulnerable to attacks due to their implementation flaws. Bernstein's attack is a well-known cache-timing attack that uses execution times as the side-channel. The major drawback of this attack is that it needs an identical target machine to perform its profiling phase where the attacker models the cache timing-behavior of the target machine. This assumption makes the attack unrealistic in many circumstances. In this work, we present an effective method to eliminate the profiling phase. We propose a methodology to model the cache timing-behavior of the target machine by trying hypothetical cache behaviors exhaustively. Our implementation results show that the proposed nonprofiled Bernstein's attack has comparable (and better in some test instances) performance to the original attack with the profiling phase.

Keywords

Cryptography, side-channel analysis, cache-timing attacks

First Page

1953

Last Page

1966

Recommended Citation

ATICI, ALİ CAN; YILMAZ, CEMAL; and SAVAŞ, ERKAY (2018) "Cache-timing attacks without a profiling phase," Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences: Vol. 26: No. 4, Article 23. https://doi.org/10.3906/elk-1711-359
Available at: https://journals.tubitak.gov.tr/elektrik/vol26/iss4/23