03-18

Leakage resistant public key cryptography

Most of the work in the formal analysis of cryptographic schemes traditionally concentrated in abstract adversarial models that do not capture side-channel attacks. Such attacks exploit various forms of unintended information leakage, which is inherent to almost all physical implementations. In light of the prevalence of such attacks there are several attempts to model them and suggest schemes that are resistant to some of these attacks. I will describe recent developments in the area, especially those inspired by the ``cold boot attacks" of Halderman et al (Usenix Security 2008) and the model suggested by Akavia, Goldwasser and Vaikuntanathan (TCC 2009) in which adversarially chosen functions of the secret key are leaked to the attacker. In particular I will show a new simple construction of a public-key cryptosystem resistant to leakage of almost all the key. I will also discuss directions for future research. Joint work with Gil Segev