Internal and External Re-keying and the way forward

Abstract

Side Channel Analysis are the security attacks due to the issues in the implementations. This attack bypasses the mathematical security provided by the cryptographic algorithms. These attacks are broadly categorized into the issues related to architectural of the chip manufacturing, attack due to unwanted leakages like power leakage, acoustic leakage, thermal leakage or electromagnetic leakages, and the issues due to programming vulnerabilities for example the heartbleed bug etc. The architectural related issues are fixed when the newer version of hardware is designed once the vulnerability is found in the earlier version. The programming related attacks are solved by patching the software and updating the code that caused the vulnerability to be exploited. The leakage issues are the ongoing issues since it was first discovered in 1997. Among the various leakage issues, the acoustic and thermal leakages aids in the attack related to power analysis. The Electromagnetic attack boils down to the power analysis issue and hence, it all comes down to the power analysis attack. Since it was discovered, the researchers have suggested the solutions for them but on the other side, they would also be vulnerable again. The Power analysis attacks are mainly classified into Simple Power Analysis (SPA), Differential Power Analysis (DPA), Correlation Power Analysis (CPA), and profiled attacks. Their countermeasures are mainly masking and rekeying apart from architectural changes. The masking has been researched extensively and have been widely implemented countermeasure. However, it comes with a very big overhead. Therefore, the researchers started exploring the rekeying to counter them. Rekeying has been classified mainly into the internal and external rekeying both having its advantages and disadvantages. There is currently no literature available that discusses both in detail. This work surveys the work on both the approaches and suggest the way forward for the researchers of the re-keying.