Paper 2024/1035

Reading It like an Open Book: Single-trace Blind Side-channel Attacks on Garbled Circuit Frameworks

Sirui Shen, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
Chenglu Jin, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
Abstract

Garbled circuits (GC) are a secure multiparty computation protocol that enables two parties to jointly compute a function using their private data without revealing it to each other. While garbled circuits are proven secure at the protocol level, implementations can still be vulnerable to side-channel attacks. Recently, side-channel analysis of GC implementations has garnered significant interest from researchers. We investigate popular open-source GC frameworks and discover that the AES encryption used in the garbling process follows a secret-dependent sequence. This vulnerability allows private inputs to be exposed through side-channel analysis. Based on this finding, we propose a side-channel attack on garbled circuits to recover the private inputs of both parties. Our attack does not require access to any plaintexts or ciphertexts in the protocol and is single-trace, adhering to the constraint that a garbled circuit can be executed only once. Furthermore, unlike existing attacks that can only target input non-XOR gates, our method applies to both input and internal non-XOR gates. Consequently, the secrets associated with every non-XOR gate are fully exposed as in an open book. We comprehensively evaluate our attack in various scenarios. First, we perform the attack on single-platform software implementations of standard AES and interleaved AES on a 32-bit ARM processor, achieving a $100\%$ success rate in both cases. Next, we target a hardware implementation on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, where the resolution of power consumption measurements and the number of samples are significantly limited. In this scenario, our attack achieves a success rate of $79.58\%$. Finally, we perform a cross-platform attack on two processors with different microarchitectures representing the two parties. The differing execution cycles and power sensors across the platforms increase the difficulty of side-channel analysis. Despite these challenges, our point-of-interest (POI) selection method allows our attack to achieve a $100\%$ success rate in this scenario as well. We also discuss effective countermeasures that can be readily applied to GC frameworks to mitigate this vulnerability.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Garbled CircuitsSide-channel analysisSingle-trace attackCross-platform attackFPGA
Contact author(s)
shensirui @ gmail com
History
2024-06-28: approved
2024-06-26: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/1035
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/1035,
      author = {Sirui Shen and Chenglu Jin},
      title = {Reading It like an Open Book: Single-trace Blind Side-channel Attacks on Garbled Circuit Frameworks},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2024/1035},
      year = {2024},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1035}
}
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