2026/1632 (PDF) Last updated: 2026-08-07
Counters and Nonces for Mitigating Ciphertext Side Channels
Moritz Peters, Jens Alich, Ashwin Jha, Gregor Leander, Yuval Yarom, Tim Güneysu
Applications

Recent works have highlighted the risk of deterministic memory encryption, as used for example in AMD SEV. In the so-called ciphertext side-channel attack, an adversary leaks sensitive information, such as cryptographic keys, from an encrypted VM by observing changes in the encrypted contents of the memory. To date, countermeasures have been quite restricted in scope and have not addressed the root cause. Alternatively, some studies suggest adding freshness to memory encryption. However,...

2026/1614 (PDF) Last updated: 2026-08-05
LFSRs and Boolean Masking: An In-depth Security Analysis
Anna Guinet, Jan Schoone, Niklas Höher, Dina Hesse, Tim Güneysu
Implementation

Masking is a widely adopted countermeasure to protect cryptographic implementations from side-channel attacks. Subsequent research has focused on designing masking schemes and formally proving their security, notably through the development of automated tools, within models abstracting the reality of a sidechannel analysis. These designs rely on an external source of randomness; however, there is currently no consensus on the choice of (pseudo-)random number generators for masking. To the...