Private Circuits: Securing Hardware against Probing Attacks

Private Circuits: Securing Hardware against Probing Attacks

2003 | Yuval Ishai, Amit Sahai, and David Wagner
This paper addresses the challenge of protecting privacy in circuits when an adversary can access a bounded number of wires, a scenario known as probing attacks. These attacks are motivated by side-channel vulnerabilities in hardware implementations of cryptographic systems, which can leak information about internal computations. The authors propose several efficient techniques to build private circuits that resist such attacks, providing a formal threat model and proofs of security for their constructions. They focus on Boolean circuits and show how to transform any circuit into a larger, more secure circuit that remains secure even if the adversary can observe up to \( t \) internal bits per clock cycle. The constructions are generic and apply to any cryptosystem, offering a principled approach to achieving provable security against a wide range of side-channel attacks. The paper also discusses the relationship between their work and secure multi-party computation (MPC) and presents specific constructions for stateless and stateful circuits, including statistically private transformations that improve efficiency for large values of \( t \).This paper addresses the challenge of protecting privacy in circuits when an adversary can access a bounded number of wires, a scenario known as probing attacks. These attacks are motivated by side-channel vulnerabilities in hardware implementations of cryptographic systems, which can leak information about internal computations. The authors propose several efficient techniques to build private circuits that resist such attacks, providing a formal threat model and proofs of security for their constructions. They focus on Boolean circuits and show how to transform any circuit into a larger, more secure circuit that remains secure even if the adversary can observe up to \( t \) internal bits per clock cycle. The constructions are generic and apply to any cryptosystem, offering a principled approach to achieving provable security against a wide range of side-channel attacks. The paper also discusses the relationship between their work and secure multi-party computation (MPC) and presents specific constructions for stateless and stateful circuits, including statistically private transformations that improve efficiency for large values of \( t \).
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