Cryptanalysis of a Chaotic Block Cryptographic System Against Template Attacks

The security of chaotic cryptographic system can be theoretically evaluated by using conventional statistical tests and numerical simulations, such as the character frequency test, entropy test, avalanche test and SP 800-22 tests. However, when the cryptographic algorithm operates on a cryptosystem, the leakage information such as power dissipation, electromagnetic emission and time-consuming can be used by attackers to analyze the secret keys, namely the Side Channel Analysis (SCA) attack. In this paper, a cryptanalysis method is proposed for evaluating the security of a chaotic block cryptographic system from a hardware perspective by utilizing the Template Attacks (TAs). Firstly, a chaotic block cryptographic system is described briefly and implemented based on an Atmel XMEGA microcontroller. Then the TA using a multivariate Gaussian model is introduced. In order to reduce computational complexity and improve the efficiency of TA, the Hamming weight is used in this work to model power consumption traces. The proposed TA method has the following advantages including (a) using the sum of difference to select points of interest of traces, (b) using a data processing method to minimize the influences on power information modeling from the redundant sampling points, and (c) all the traces are aligned precisely before establishing the templates. Experimental results show that the TA can be used to attack the chaotic cryptographic systems and is more efficient, i.e. similar to 32% less attack traces than correlation power analysis, when the templates are properly built.