Combination of SW countermeasure and CPU modification on FPGA against power analysis

  • Authors:
  • Daisuke Nakatsu;Yang Li;Kazuo Sakiyama;Kazuo Ohta

  • Affiliations:
  • The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan;The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan;The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan;The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan

  • Venue:
  • WISA'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Information security applications
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This paper presents a design flow for secure software (SW) implementations of cryptographic algorithms against Side-Channel Attacks (SCAs) by using a CPU modification. The development of countermeasures to increase resistance against the SCAs in SW implementations is a topic of ongoing research. Researchers have proposed SW-level countermeasures in order to defeat the SCAs. However, we notice that more secure SW implementations are possible with an additional support from a hardware (HW) level countermeasure such as partial CPU modifications. This paper proposes a co-design approach of SW-level countermeasures and CPU modifications to defeat the SCAs on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). As a case study of evaluating an effectiveness of the combination of our SW-/HW-level countermeasures, the S-box algorithm proposed by Coron et al. [1] is used. According to our experimental results, we find that the algorithm can be performed with a higher resistance against power analysis by applying our countermeasures. Our proposed design flow is applicable to various kinds of algorithms as well.