Drm to counter side-channel attacks?

Abstract

In the DRM setting, the attacker is a very powerful adversary, owning the software as well as the underlying hardware. This context is far different from the black-box attacker commonly considered in conventional cryptography.Therefore, cryptographers have tried to design new cryptographic tools fitting the DRM requirements. A related issuein cryptography is that of side-channel attacks, where theattacker is stronger than the black-box attacker, but usually weaker than a DRM attacker. In this paper, we aim toshow that the study of side-channel attacks can benefit fromDRM research, and in particular from the attacker modelsand solutions tailored to this specific setting. We focus ona specific issue, namely the cache attacks against the AES,and show how current counter-measures can be seen as restricted versions of a previous protection proposed in theDRM setting. We demonstrate that those kind of counter-measures are weak against cache-based side-channel attacks by reusing results from the DRM setting.