Strong Converse Theorem for Source Encryption under Side-Channel Attacks
This work addresses security vulnerabilities in encryption systems for scenarios where side-channel attacks target secret keys, though it appears incremental as it extends existing criteria.
The paper tackles the security of source encryption with symmetric keys under side-channel attacks by proposing a general framework and a new security criterion based on maximum conditional mutual information, establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for secure transmission and proving theoretical results on achievability.
We are interested in investigating the security of source encryption with a symmetric key under side-channel attacks. In this paper, we propose a general framework of source encryption with a symmetric key under the side-channel attacks, which applies to \emph{any} source encryption with a symmetric key and \emph{any} kind of side-channel attacks targeting the secret key. We also propose a new security criterion for strong secrecy under side-channel attacks, which is a natural extension of mutual information, i.e., \emph{the maximum conditional mutual information between the plaintext and the ciphertext given the adversarial key leakage, where the maximum is taken over all possible plaintext distribution}. Under this new criterion, we successfully formulate the rate region, which serves as both necessary and sufficient conditions to have secure transmission even under side-channel attacks. Furthermore, we also prove another theoretical result on our new security criterion, which might be interesting in its own right: in the case of the discrete memoryless source, no perfect secrecy under side-channel attacks in the standard security criterion, i.e., the ordinary mutual information, is achievable without achieving perfect secrecy in this new security criterion, although our new security criterion is more strict than the standard security criterion.