Leakage-Resilient Cryptography: A Survey of Recent Advances

Side-channel attacks represent a very frequent and severe type of attack against implementations of cryptographic protocols. Most countermeasures proposed until recently are ad-hoc, offer only partial remedy and fail to capture the problem in its entirety. In light of this, the last few years the cryptographic community has tried to set the theoretical foundations in order to formally address the problem of side-channel attacks. These efforts led to the development of Leakage Resilient Cryptography the goal of which is to design cryptographic protocols that remain secure in the presence of arbitrary, yet bounded, information about the secret key. In this survey, we review recent advances towards this direction. We first present an abstract and general framework that captures a wide range of side-channel attacks. We then present some of the most influential models from the literature as special cases of the general framework and describe how standard (leakage-free) security notions translate in the presence of leakage. Finally, we discuss the extent to which practical attacking scenarios are captured by the existing models and suggest some interesting directions for future research.