International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We present a novel approach to small area and low-latency first-order masking in hardware. The core idea is to separate the processing of shares in time in order to achieve non-completeness. Resulting circuits are proven first-order glitchextended PINI secure. This means the method can be straightforwardly applied to mask arbitrary functions without constraints which the designer must take care of. Furthermore we show that an implementation can benefit from optimization through EDA tools without sacrificing security. We provide concrete results of several case studies. Our low-latency implementation of a complete PRINCE core shows a 32% area improvement (44% with optimization) over the state-of-the-art. Our PRINCE S-Box passes formal verification with a tool and the complete core on FPGA shows no first-order leakage in TVLA with 100 million traces. Our low-latency implementation of the AES S-Box costs roughly one third (one quarter with optimization) of the area of state-of-the-art implementations. It shows no first-order leakage in TVLA with 250 million traces.

This paper provides necessary properties to algorithmically secure firstorder maskings in scalar micro-architectures. The security notions of threshold implementations are adapted following micro-processor leakage effects which are known to the literature. The resulting notions, which are based on the placement of shares, are applied to a two-share randomness-free PRESENT cipher and Keccak-f. The assembly implementations are put on a RISC-V and an ARM Cortex-M4 core. All designs are validated in the glitch and transition extended probing model and their implementations via practical lab analysis.

Fault attacks impose a serious threat against the practical implementations of cryptographic algorithms. Statistical Ineffective Fault Attacks (SIFA), exploiting the dependency between the secret data and the fault propagation overcame many of the known countermeasures. Later, several countermeasures have been proposed to tackle this attack using error detection methods. However, the efficiency of the countermeasures, in part governed by the number of error checks, still remains a challenge.In this work, we propose a fault countermeasure, StaTI, based on threshold implementations and linear encoding techniques. The proposed countermeasure protects the implementations of cryptographic algorithms against both side-channel and fault adversaries in a non-combined attack setting. We present a new composable notion, stability, to protect a threshold implementation against a formal gate/register-faulting adversary. Stability ensures fault propagation, making a single error check of the output suffice. To illustrate the stability notion, first, we provide stable encodings of the XOR and AND gates. Then, we present techniques to encode threshold implementations of S-boxes, and provide stable encodings of some quadratic S-boxes together with their security and performance evaluation. Additionally, we propose general encoding techniques to transform a threshold implementation of any function (e.g., non-injective functions) to a stable one. We then provide an encoding technique to use in symmetric primitives which encodes state elements together significantly reducing the encoded state size. Finally, we used StaTI to implement a secure Keccak on FPGA and report on its efficiency.

This work introduces second-order masked implementation of LED, Midori, Skinny, and Prince ciphers which do not require fresh masks to be updated at every clock cycle. The main idea lies on a combination of the constructions given by Shahmirzadi and Moradi at CHES 2021, and the theory presented by Beyne et al. at Asiacrypt 2020. The presented masked designs only use a minimal number of shares, i.e., three to achieve second-order security, and we make use of a trick to pair a couple of S-boxes to reduce their latency. The theoretical security analyses of our constructions are based on the linear-cryptanalytic properties of the underlying masked primitive as well as SILVER, the leakage verification tool presented at Asiacrypt 2020. To improve this cryptanalytic analysis, we use the noisy probing model which allows for the inclusion of noise in the framework of Beyne et al. We further provide FPGA-based experimental security analysis confirming second-order protection of our masked implementations.

Masking schemes are the most popular countermeasure to mitigate Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) attacks. Compared to software, their hardware implementations require certain considerations with respect to physical defaults, such as glitches. To counter this extended leakage effect, the technique known as Threshold Implementation (TI) has proven to be a reliable solution. However, its efficiency, namely the number of shares, is tied to the algebraic degree of the target function. As a result, the application of TI may lead to unaffordable implementation costs. This dependency is relaxed by the successor schemes where the minimum number of d + 1 shares suffice for dth-order protection independent of the function’s algebraic degree. By this, although the number of input shares is reduced, the implementation costs are not necessarily low due to their high demand for fresh randomness. It becomes even more challenging when a joint low-latency and low-randomness cost is desired. In this work, we provide a methodology to realize the second-order glitch-extended probing-secure implementation of cubic functions with three shares while allowing to reuse fresh randomness. This enables us to construct low-latency second-order secure implementations of several popular lightweight block ciphers, including Skinny, Midori, and Prince, with a very limited number of fresh masks. Notably, compared to state-of-the-art equivalent implementations, our designs lower the latency in terms of the number of clock cycles while keeping randomness costs low.

While traditional symmetric algorithms like AES and SHA3 are optimized for efficient hardware and software implementations, a range of emerging applications using advanced cryptographic protocols such as multi-party computation and zero-knowledge proofs require optimization with respect to a different metric: arithmetic complexity. In this paper we study the design of secure cryptographic algorithms optimized to minimize this metric. We begin by identifying the differences in the design space between such arithmetization-oriented ciphers and traditional ones, with particular emphasis on the available tools, efficiency metrics, and relevant cryptanalysis. This discussion highlights a crucial point --- the considerations for designing arithmetization-oriented ciphers are oftentimes different from the considerations arising in the design of software- and hardware-oriented ciphers. The natural next step is to identify sound principles to securely navigate this new terrain, and to materialize these principles into concrete designs. To this end, we present the Marvellous design strategy which provides a generic way to easily instantiate secure and efficient algorithms for this emerging domain. We then show two examples for families following this approach. These families --- Vision and Rescue --- are benchmarked with respect to three use cases: the ZK-STARK proof system, proof systems based on Rank-One Constraint Satisfaction (R1CS), and Multi-Party Computation (MPC). These benchmarks show that our algorithms achieve a highly compact algebraic description, and thus benefit the advanced cryptographic protocols that employ them. Evidence is provided that this is the case also in real-world implementations.

A new approach to the security analysis of hardware-oriented masked ciphers against second-order side-channel attacks is developed. By relying on techniques from symmetric-key cryptanalysis, concrete security bounds are obtained in a variant of the probing model that allows the adversary to make only a bounded, but possibly very large, number of measurements. Specifically, it is formally shown how a bounded-query variant of robust probing security can be reduced to the linear cryptanalysis of masked ciphers. As a result, the compositional issues of higher-order threshold implementations can be overcome without relying on fresh randomness. From a practical point of view, the aforementioned approach makes it possible to transfer many of the desirable properties of first-order threshold implementations, such as their low randomness usage, to the second-order setting. For example, a straightforward application to the block cipher LED results in a masking using less than 700 random bits including the initial sharing. In addition, the cryptanalytic approach introduced in this paper provides additional insight into the design of masked ciphers and allows for a quantifiable trade-off between security and performance.