Power analysis attack on hardware implementation of MAC-Keccak on FPGAs

Abstract

Keccak is the hash function selected by NIST as the new SHA-3 standard. Keccak is built on Sponge construction and it provides a new MAC function called MAC-Keccak. These new algorithms have raised questions with regards to side-channel leakage and analysis attacks of MAC-Keccak. So far there exists prior work on attacks of software implementations of MAC-Keccak, but there has been no comprehensive side-channel vulnerability assessment of its hardware implementation. In this paper we describe an attack on the θ step of the first round of MAC-Keccak implemented on an FPGA. We construct several different side-channel leakage models and implement attacks based on them. Our work shows that an unmasked hardware implementation of SHA-3 is vulnerable to power-based side-channel attacks.