Cache-collision side-channel analysis and attacks against AES-GCM Online publication date: Wed, 31-Mar-2021
by James Huang; Xiaoming Li
International Journal of Big Data Intelligence (IJBDI), Vol. 7, No. 4, 2020
Abstract: Data security is an important issue in big data applications. The sheer data volume provides way more opportunities for a potential attacker to observe and identify patterns in computation and data. In this paper, we reveal that the data/computation patterns derived from the observation of large volume of data can be associated with the key used in the AES-GCM algorithm, one of the foundation algorithms in data security. The paper presents a software-based cache-collision timing attack against the well known authenticated encryption scheme AES-GCM. The attack can be successful if enough data (plaintext-ciphertext pairs) are processed and the hash key H used for generating look-up tables in software implementation. We present an attack model and an implementation of the attack based on OpenSSL, a widely used library that provides security-related functions for many applications. In most cases, our attack methodology is able to converge and extract the hidden key.
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