On highly nonlinear s-boxes and their inability to thwart DPA attacks

  • Authors:
  • Claude Carlet

  • Affiliations:
  • INRIA, Projet CODES, University of Paris 8 (MAATICAH), Le Chesnay, France

  • Venue:
  • INDOCRYPT'05 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Cryptology in India
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Prouff has introduced recently, at FSE 2005, the notion of transparency order of S-boxes. This new characteristic is related to the ability of an S-box, used in a cryptosystem in which the round keys are introduced by addition, to thwart single-bit or multi-bit DPA attacks on the system. If this parameter has sufficiently small value, then the S-box is able to withstand DPA attacks without that ad-hoc modifications in the implementation be necessary (these modifications make the encryption about twice slower). We prove a lower bound on the transparency order of highly nonlinear S-boxes. We show that some highly nonlinear functions, and in particular the S-box of AES, have very bad transparency orders.