Cryptanalysis of the Xiao - Lai White-Box AES Implementation

In the white-box attack context, i.e., the setting where an implementation of a cryptographic algorithm is executed on an untrusted platform, the adversary has full access to the implementation and its execution environment. In 2002, Chow et al. presented a white-box AES implementation which aims at preventing key-extraction in the white-box attack context. However, in 2004, Billet et al. presented an efficient practical attack on Chow et al.’s white-box AES implementation. In response, in 2009, Xiao and Lai proposed a new white-box AES implementation which is claimed to be resistant against Billet et al.’s attack. This paper presents a practical cryptanalysis of the white-box AES implementation proposed by Xiao et al. The linear equivalence algorithm presented by Biryukov et al. is used as a building block. The cryptanalysis efficiently extracts the AES key from Xiao et al.’s white-box AES implementation with a work factor of about 232.