Information Theoretic Security for Broadcasting of Two Encrypted Sources under Side-Channel Attacks

Entropy (Basel). 2019 Aug 9;21(8):781. doi: 10.3390/e21080781.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze the secure communication problem for broadcasting two encrypted sources in the presence of an adversary which launches side-channel attacks. The adversary is not only allowed to eavesdrop the ciphertexts in the public communication channel, but is also allowed to gather additional information on the secret keys via the side-channels, physical phenomenon leaked by the encryption devices during the encryption process, such as the fluctuations of power consumption, heat, or electromagnetic radiation generated by the encryption devices. Based on our framework, we propose a countermeasure against such adversary by using the post-encryption-compression (PEC) paradigm, in the case of one-time-pad encryption. We implement the PEC paradigm using affine encoders constructed from linear encoders and derive the explicit the sufficient conditions to attain the exponential decay of the information leakage as the block lengths of encrypted sources become large. One interesting feature of the proposed countermeasure is that its performance is independent from the type of side information leaked by the encryption devices.

Keywords: Shannon cipher system; information theoretic security; one helper source coding problem; side-channel attacks; strong converse theorem.