Nicolas Costes
Ph.D. started in: 2019
Expected year of graduation: 2022
COINS consortium member: University of Bergen
Supervised by: Martijn Stam, Øyvind Ytrehus
Research area: Cryptography
Project title: High Performance Power Analysis Attacks
Project description: My project is focused on side channel cryptanalysis and in particular, power analysis attacks. While this attacks have been thoroughly investigated in the last years, there are still a lot of open questions in this area. This is mainly due to the fact that mounting a real world attack against a protected device is supposed to be impossible. However, recent works have made clear that the actual protection provided by some countermeasure is overestimated and that their design are based on models that fall short when they are compared to the real devices.
Moreover, a lot of attacks artificially split their target in two distinct part: the statistical distinguisher (usually very optimized) and the key enumeration (that no one actually run). One can therefore ask, how much computational power is needed when considering jointly those two part, like an attacker would do. This is the question I will try to answer during this PHD, using High Performance Computing and a fine study of the countermeasures and their implementation on real devices.
