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Secure and Efficient Use of Reconfigurable Hardware Devices in Symmetric Cryptography

PhD THESIS 2004

Abstract:

Due to its potential to greatly accelerate a wide variety of applications,recon¯gurable computing has gained importance in the industrial development of digital signal processing. Recent devices such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can notably be used to deal with the high throughput constraints of video processing applications. They also constitute attractive options for the design of encryption algorithms. In this thesis, we investigate the secure and e±cient implementation of symmetric cryptographic algorithms in these recon¯gurable hardware devices. At the implementation level, we demonstrate that good design rules adapted to devices and algorithms allow the hardware performances of symmetric-key block ciphers to be signi¯cantly improved. The resulting methodology is applied to the recently chosen (October 2000) Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Rijndael. At the application level, we analyze the possibility to use the high throughputs o®ered by hardware implementations to mount exhaustive key search attacks against encryption algorithms. We speci¯cally investigate a time-memory tradeo® attack using distinguished points and provide a detailed theoretical analysis of the di®erent attack parameters. At a more physical level, we question the feasibility of power analysis attacks in the context of recon¯gurable hardware devices. Based on simple hypotheses, we mount successful attacks against the two main symmetric cryptographic standards, i.e. the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and the AES Rijndael. We also provide a general framework to evaluate a hardware design security with respect to power analysis. Finally, at the algorithmic level, we derive a list of potential improvements for block ciphers in terms of hardware implementation effciency and security against physical attacks. These observations are combined into the platform-speci¯c algorithm ICEBERG for which FPGA implementations exhibit better performances than most recent block ciphers.

Paper Available At:

http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/~fstandae/thesis_fxs.pdf

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Comments About Paper

1. Transposition ciphers can be sipelmr, allowing the sender and receiver to communicate with a minimum of effort exhausted learning and employing the 1/1/2013 8:08:39 AM

- 1. Transposition ciphers can be sipelmr, allowing the sender and receiver to communicate with a minimum of effort exhausted learning and employing the shift or permutation of the plaintext being used. While someone using a substitution cipher would have to look up each individual symbol and rewrite the message, someone reading a transposition cipher would just have to memorize the key, then shift or rearrange the ciphered message to reveal the intended message. The disadvantage of this type of cipher is that it is not very secure. Once someone figures out the key or shift, they can then decipher any message using that particular key. In substitution ciphers, they must figure out the meaning of each different symbol, with no correlation to each other. 2. People may need to use a cipher or code to keep a variety of things secret. For example, if a husband was meeting with a group of friends to go out gambling once a week, but his wife prohibited him from engaging in such activity, he and his friends could communicate in code. Alternatively, email is a very important means of communication that requires encoding to protect people s security and private information. If anyone were able to intercept and read everyone s emails, people would stop using emails to communicate with each other. This would apply to almost all other means of internet-driven communication. 3. Well, first off, our culture and society is far more advanced than the early Muslim civilization. The way we educate our children significantly impacts the way they think and look at the world. We are taught to pay attention to spelling, numbers, and facts. Naturally many people would focus on the letters or symbols that recur most frequently. Then a natural progression would be to compare those recurrences to a sample of pain text. 4.Singh means that people rely on codes and ciphers too much. When they believe their code is unbreakable, they write whatever they want, no matter how incriminating it may be, since they are confident that no one will be able to interpret the message, even if it is intercepted. When not using a code or cipher, people trying to keep a secret will be more carful in what they write down, and try not to give anything away or provide valuable information for those who may intercept the message. If this same level of precaution were taken in conjunction with a code or cipher, evidence would be extremely difficult to find.