Final Report Summary - PSPC (Provable Security for Physical Cryptography)
Traditionally, research on side-channel security is done by practitioners and is fundamentally different from the provable-security approach followed by modern cryptography. The proposed countermeasures are usually ad-hoc, protecting only against particular attacks (as opposed to any resource bounded adversary), and backed only by heuristic security arguments (as opposed to proofs).
In this ERC project entitled “provable security for physical cryptography” we worked towards expanding the field of provable security to also include side-channel and tampering attacks, thus moving research on countermeasures against physical attacks from the realm of engineering and security research to modern cryptography. The starting point was the concept of Leakage-Resilient cryptography which we introduced in 2009. When we started this project, the field of provable security against physical attack was still in its infancy, posing many exciting theoretical and practical questions. In this project, significant progress was made on applied and theoretical aspects of provable side-channel security. Moreover this research lead to unexpected progress in different domains. We resolved several foundational issues and constructed new efficient leakage and tamper resilient schemes. The tools and techniques developed during this project have found surprising applications in other domains. For example, our work on tamper-proof code-based cryptography lead to constructions of highly efficient authentication schemes which were awarded the Eurocrypt best paper award in 2011 and the German IT security prize in 2012.
The ERC grant allowed the PI to build a highly productive research group at IST Austria, currently consisting of 3 PhD students and 3 postdocs.