Provably secure higher-order masking of AES

  • Authors:
  • Matthieu Rivain;Emmanuel Prouff

  • Affiliations:
  • CryptoExperts;Oberthur Technologies

  • Venue:
  • CHES'10 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Cryptographic hardware and embedded systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Implementations of cryptographic algorithms are vulnerable to Side Channel Analysis (SCA). To counteract it, masking schemes are usually involved which randomize key-dependent data by the addition of one or several random value(s) (the masks). When dth-order masking is involved (i.e. when d masks are used per key-dependent variable), the complexity of performing an SCA grows exponentially with the order d. The design of generic dth-order masking schemes taking the order d as security parameter is therefore of great interest for the physical security of cryptographic implementations. This paper presents the first generic dth-order masking scheme for AES with a provable security and a reasonable software implementation overhead. Our scheme is based on the hardware-oriented masking scheme published by Ishai et al. at Crypto 2003. Compared to this scheme, our solution can be efficiently implemented in software on any general-purpose processor. This result is of importance considering the lack of solution for d ≥ 3.