Evaluation of countermeasure implementations based on boolean masking to thwart side-channel attacks

Houssem Maghrebi, Jean Luc Danger, Florent Flament, Sylvain Guilley, Laurent Sauvage

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

This paper presents hardware implementations of a DES cryptoprocessor with masking countermeasures and their evaluation against side-channel attacks (SCAs) in FPGAs. The masking protection has been mainly studied from a theoretical viewpoint without any thorough test in a noisy real world designs. In this study the masking countermeasure is tested with firstorder and higher-order SCAs on a fully-fledged DES. Beside a classical implementation of the DES substitution boxes (SBoxes) a simple structure called Universal Substitution boxes with Masking (USM) is proposed. It meets the constraint of low complexity as state-of-the-art masked S-Boxes are mostly built from large look-up tables or complex calculations with combinatorial logic gates. However attacks on USM has underlined some security weaknesses. ROM masked implementation exhibits greater robustness as it cannot be attacked with first-order DPA. Nevertheless any masking implementation remains sensitive to Higher-Order Differential Power Analysis (HO-DPA) as shown in a proposed attack. This attack is based on a variance analysis of the observed power consumption and it clearly shows the vulnerabilities of masking countermeasures.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication3rd International Conference on Signals, Circuits and Systems, SCS 2009
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2009
Externally publishedYes
Event3rd International Conference on Signals, Circuits and Systems, SCS 2009 - Medenine, Tunisia
Duration: 6 Nov 20098 Nov 2009

Publication series

Name3rd International Conference on Signals, Circuits and Systems, SCS 2009

Conference

Conference3rd International Conference on Signals, Circuits and Systems, SCS 2009
Country/TerritoryTunisia
CityMedenine
Period6/11/098/11/09

Keywords

  • FPGA
  • Higher-order DPA
  • Masking countermeasure
  • Side-channel attack
  • Variance-based power attack (VPA)

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