ERC Starting Grant obtained

ICTEAM member François-Xavier Standaert has been awarded with a Starting Independent Research Grant by the European Research Council, for a project on CRyptographic Algorithms and Secure Hardware (CRASH)

The grant envisions new strategies to improve security against physical attacks. In particular, side-channel attacks are an important threat against cryptographic implementations, in which an adversary takes advantage of physical information leakages (such as the power consumption of a smart card) in order to recover secret information. By allowing to circumvent the models in which standard security proofs are obtained, they can lead to powerful (e.g. key recovery) attacks against a large class of devices. Therefore, such attacks exhibit a gap between the mathematical abstractions of modern cryptography and the concrete peculiarities of actual electronic circuits. By considering physical and algorithmic issues in a unified way, the CRASH project is expected to get rid of the incompatibilities between the different models that can be used to explain the information leakage in cryptographic implementations. It aims to formalize side-channel attacks and to efficiently prevent them, in order to develop concrete basements for the next generation of cryptographic algorithms and secure hardware.

| 6/10/2011 |