ECDSA White-Box Implementations, Feedback on CHES 2021 WhibOx Contest

Cryptographic algorithms are primarily designed to be secure in the black-box model, where an attacker can only observe their input/output behavior. However in practice, algorithms are rarely executed in a completely isolated environment and additional information is often leaked. In the context of mobile applications or connected objects, devices often lack secure storage to protect secret keys, and their generally open execution environment exposes a large attack surface. This hostile environment is captured by the white-box attack model. While many white-box implementation of block ciphers have been published since 2002, asymmetric cryptosystems have been very little studied. In my PhD thesis, we got interested in white-box implementations of ECDSA. This led us to participate in the WhibOx Contest that was organized as part of the TCHES workshops in 2021. During three months, developpers were invited to submit ECDSA white-box implementations and attackers to try to break them. In this talk, I will introduce the white-box model before explaining the specificities of the ECDSA algorithm in this context. I will then present the different attacks that we used to break almost all the challenges of the WhibOx Contest.