Abstract

The modern approach to cryptography is provable security, where one defines a meaningful formal security model and proves that schemes are secure in this model. An exception is the design of countermeasures against cryptographic sidechannel attacks, which even today is mostly based on heuristic arguments, which only try to prevent particular attacks. It was long believed that side-channels are a practical problem where theoretical cryptography was only of limited use, but recent results indicate that this view is too pessimistic, and in fact, it is possible to extend the realm of provable security also to side-channel attacks. This survey is a personal and incomplete view on the current state of this exciting and fast moving field.

Citations