The classical approach to achieve multiple security properties such as authentication, integrity and confidentiality is to combine
dedicated building blocks separately achieving each property. This apparently obvious process proves in fact to be very
difficult, as testified by numerous attacks exploiting weaknesses in the “mortar” connecting the blocks, even in widely used, and
presumably well-known, products such as OpenSSL. A promising approach to solve this issue is the use of combined primitives. This is
for example the case for authenticated encryption, a fundamental cryptographic primitive that ensures at the same time
confidentiality, integrity and authentication. Many new authenticated encryption schemes were recently proposed in the framework of the CAESAR
competition.

The goal of this research project is to investigate the efficiency and security of these new proposals. That is,
assuming that authenticated encryption will be deployed on small embedded platforms, how to guarantee that these algorithms can be
implemented within the time budget imposed by practical applications, while making sure that they cannot (or at least not easily)
be broken, especially by attacks taking advantage of physical information leakages (so-called side-channel attacks). Besides, a
more prospective research will investigate the possibilities to extend the recent trend of “leakage-resilient” cryptography
towards authentication and authenticated encryption. That is, can we design algorithms or encryption modes that are inherently more
secure against physical attacks?

Web site: http://www.securit-brussels.be/project/scaut/