CHES 2020
Since 2015, a crypto-engineering CTF is organized every year in cooperation with CHES. Former editions have focused on practical side-channel attacks, design of countermeasures, deep learning-based attacks, and white-box cryptography.
The CHES 2020 Capture the Flag (CTF) is a side-channel cryptanalysis challenge against masked implementations of the Clyde-128 Tweakable Block Cipher (TBC) which is part of the Spook candidate to the NIST lightweight cryptography competition. Different targets are proposed in parallel, both in software and in hardware, corresponding to masked implementations with various number of shares. Challengers are provided with the source code of the implementations (C in software and Verilog in hardware/FPGA), a tool to predict intermediate values of the hardware implementation, profiling sets of traces including the nonces, (random) keys, (random) plaintexts and the randomness used for masking, test sets of traces corresponding to a few fixed keys (without the masking randomness), and finally prototype attacks against a single byte of the secret key for exemplary targets. The goal of the challenge is to modify and improve the prototype attacks. The submitted attacks will be rated based on the number of measurements needed to reduce the rank of the master key below 2^32 using a rank estimation algorithm. All the attacks submitted will be made public to all challengers (under a GPLv3 license or alternatives). Link to the challenge website: https://ctf.spook.dev/.