Research focus of CASCADE

A successful attack clearly says that there is a weakness but often the attack does not identify this weakness. Of particular interest are constructive side-channel attacks, which point to the weakness. Our 'flagship' is the so-called stochastic approach, which combines engineer's expertise with quantitative mathematical methods from multivariate statistics. The stochastic aproach has several advantages over other attack techniques. Either its attack efficiency is considerably larger (compared to DPA), or the number of profiling measurements is by orders of magnitudes smaller with comparable attack efficiency (compared to template attacks). The main benefit of the stochastic approach is that it represents the leakage with regard to a vector space basis. This feature clearly supports a target-oriented associated design process. Moreover, constructive side-channel analysis may also serve as a quality metric to optimize the design- and development process.
Generally speaking, it is (not only for attackers) always desirable to exploit the given side-channel information in an optimal way. For designers and evaluators of cryptosystems it is indispensable to rate the true risk potential of an attack. This requires advanced mathematical methods from stochastics and multivariate statistics.

Research activities

Side Channel Attacks in general

timing attacks, cache attacks and power analysis, and its combinations
analysis of side-channel characteristics of HW/SW co-designed systems
constructive techniques and methods in side channel analysis
applications of constructive side channel analysis apart from attacks and design

Stochastic Approach and advanced stochastic methods for SCA

further development in general, especially of the stochastic approach
integration of principal component analysis
variants of the stochastic approach and its extension to other classes of cryptographic algorithms
investigation and exploitation of symmetry properties with design implications
interaction between attack and design

Design Methods for SCA-resistant implemenations

techniques for secure design in general
efficient and secure architectures for side channel resistant implementations, especially on FPGAs
countermeasures against side channel attacks
investigation of suitable partial reconfiguration techniques to achieve side-channel resistance
new design techniques and design-flow supporting tools for constructive SCA