Crypto: Timing Attack Analysis And Countermeasures

Abstract

The contemporary growth of Information security has made communication safe and sound; the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the most efficient symmetric algorithm to secure the information. Efforts are being made by the attackers to disrupt the widely acceptable Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) techniques which secure confidential data. The alarming situation has brought an obligation for the engineers and researchers to step forward and present a countermeasure to protect AES. The paper which is being presented is a contribution to this matter as countermeasure has been proposed which reduces the vulnerability of the AES algorithm. The timing profiles were originated of AES 128, 192 and 256-bits, countermeasure was applied to the code to reduce the vulnerability and make the execution time constant. The execution time of the core functions of AES was made symmetric at 0.6s after running the code 10k times on Visual Studio and millions of times on Dudect tool. The timing profile of AES functions were made symmetric to prevent timing attack. The timing profiles were extracted from two different tools in order to minimize the risk of timing attacks. The consistency in overhead illustrates a reduced amount of risk from the eavesdropper to break through the code by performing timing attack.