First Full-Fledged
Side Channel Attack
on HMAC-SHA-2

FortifyIQ presents a novel practical template attack on HMAC-SHA-2 intended primarily against its implementations in hardware. Side-channel attacks pose a threat to cryptographic algorithms. HMAC is an important use case of a hash function, in which the input is partially secret and thus unknown to the attacker. Despite a few publications that discuss applications of power analysis techniques to attack HMAC-SHA-2, this is the first generic method that shows a full attack on its hardware implementation.