Securing RSA Algorithm against Timing Attack

Amuthan Arjunan, Praveena Narayanan, and Kaviarasan Ramu

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pondicherry Engineering College, India

Department of Information Technology, Alpha College of Engineering and Technology, India

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Alpha College of Engineering and Technology, India

Abstract: Security plays an important role in many embedded systems. All security based algorithms are implemented in hardware or software, and on physical devices which interact with the systems and influenced by their environments. The attacker extracts, investigate and monitor these physical interactions and extracts side channel information which is used in cryptanalysis. This type of cryptanalysis is known as side channel cryptanalysis and attacks performed by using this method is known side channel attacks. There are different types of side channel attacks based on side channel information like time, power, electromagnetic information and faulty output emitted from the cryptographic devices during implementation. The attack that occurs based on the run-time by which the information gained from physical characteristics of cryptosystems to retrieve the secret key is known as the timing attack. The side channel attacks are vulnerable to both symmetric and asymmetric algorithms. RSA is an asymmetric algorithm which plays an important role in most of the applications, but this algorithm is vulnerable to timing attack. So a new technique is proposed called “Randomness Algorithm” and Optical Asymmetric Encryption Padding (OAEP) technique to improve the robustness of RSA algorithm against timing attack, by introducing randomness in computation of decryption process to make the timing information unusable to the attacker.

Keywords: Cryptanalysis, side channel attacks, timing attack, RSA, OAEP.