Leakage-Resilient Cryptography over Large Finite Fields: Theory and Practice

Information leakage is a major concern in modern day IT-security. In fact, a malicious user is often able to extract information about private values from the computation performed on the devices. In specific settings, such as RFID, where a low computational complexity is required, it is hard to apply standard techniques to achieve resilience against this kind of attacks. In this paper, we present a framework to make cryptographic primitives based on large finite fields robust against information leakage with a bounded computational cost. The approach makes use of the inner product extractor and guarantees security in the presence of leakage in a widely accepted model. Furthermore, we show how to apply the proposed techniques to the authentication protocol Lapin, and we compare it to existing solutions.