On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 05:51:50PM +1300, Peter Gutmann wrote: > For the past several years I've been making a point of asking users of crypto > on embedded systems (which would be particularly good targets for side-channel > attacks, particularly ones that provide content-protection capabilities) > whether they'd consider enabling side-channel attack (SCA - no, not that SCA) > protection in their use of crypto. So far I've never found anyone who's made [...]
> In other words the user has to make a conscious decision that SCA protection > is important enough that performance/power consumption can be sacrificed for > it. Can anyone provide any data on users making this tradeoff? And since > negative results are also results, a response of "I've never found anyone who > cares either" is also useful. Since the information may be commercially I have little experience on the embedded crypto side but I do maintain a crypto library that has some non-zero number of users on general desktop and server machines. Basic protections ala your point 2 are provided and enabled by default (blinding, and checking private key operations for consistency with the public, to prevent the really easy attacks). There used to be a toggle to disable blinding, which as far as I know was never used - or at least nobody complained when I removed the toggle. To my memory nobody has ever asked about what SCA measures are or are not enabled, or how to toggle them, though I do have a FAQ entry about it, so perhaps people who really wanted serious side-channel resistence just read that FAQ and moved on to another implementation without ever bothering to contact me - certainly there are some self-selection problems with my sampling. When FlexSecure wrote Botan's ECC implementation for BSI, they implemented a number of anti-timing attack countermeasures - but they were being paid to care about that, so this is probably not a valid datapoint. -Jack --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
