Secure and Efficient Masking of Lightweight Ciphers in Software and Hardware (with Application to the Spook AEAD)
(2020) NIST Lightweight Cryptography Workshop 2020 — Location: Online (19.October.2020)
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- Authors
Bronchain, Olivier 
- Abstract
- Security against side-channel attacks has been explicitly mentioned by the NIST as a target in the ongoing standardization process for lightweight cryp- tography. Many candidates to the competition took this criteria into account by minimizing the number of non-linear operations (e.g., AND gates) in their algorithms, which is in general beneficial to the masking countermeasure. In this talk, we will discuss: – The gains that lightweight ciphers can offer over the AES for masking, – The various challenges that the secure implemention of masking raises in software and in hardware, and tracks to solve them efficiently. For this purpose, we will leverage state-of-the-art results from the masking litera- ture [1, 2] and illustrate them thanks to the side-channel cryptanalysis challenge against masked Spook implementations that is (resp., was) running for CHES 2021 (resp., 2020). See https://ctf.spook.dev/ for the details. We will conclude by discussing the extent to which similar conclusions hold for other lightweight ciphers with similar non-linear complexity, and suggesting directions for a fair evaluation and comparison of masked implementations.
- Affiliations
Citations
Bronchain, O., Cassiers, G., & Standaert, F.-X. (2020). Secure and Efficient Masking of Lightweight Ciphers in Software and Hardware (with Application to the Spook AEAD). NIST Lightweight Cryptography Workshop 2020, Online. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/164329