International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Symmetric ciphers operating in (small or mid-size) prime fields have been shown to be promising candidates to maintain security against low-noise (or even noise-free) side-channel leakage. In order to design prime ciphers that best trade physical security and implementation efficiency, it is essential to understand how side-channel security evolves with the field size (i.e., scaling trends). Unfortunately, it has also been shown that such a scaling trend depends on the leakage functions and cannot be explained by the standard metrics used to analyze Boolean masking with noise. In this work, we therefore initiate a formal study of prime field masking for two canonical leakage functions: bit leakages and Hamming weight leakages. By leveraging theoretical results from the leakage-resilient secret sharing literature, we explain formally why (1) bit leakages correspond to a worst-case and do not encourage operating in larger fields, and (2) an opposite conclusion holds for Hamming weight leakages, where increasing the prime field modulus p can contribute to a security amplification that is exponential in the number of shares,with log(p) seen as security parameter like the noise variance in Boolean masking. We combine these theoretical results with experimental ones and show that the interest masking in larger prime fields can degrade gracefully when leakage functions slightly deviate from the Hamming weight abstraction, motivating further research towards characterizing (ideally wide) classes of leakage functions offering such guarantees.

Non-malleable codes (Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs, ICS 2010 & JACM 2018) allow protecting arbitrary cryptographic primitives against related-key attacks (RKAs). Even when using codes that are guaranteed to be non-malleable against a single tampering attempt, one obtains RKA security against poly-many tampering attacks at the price of assuming perfect memory erasures. In contrast, continuously non-malleable codes (Faust, Mukherjee, Nielsen and Venturi, TCC 2014) do not suffer from this limitation, as the non-malleability guarantee holds against poly-many tampering attempts. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of constructions of continuously non-malleable codes, while standard non-malleable codes are known for a large variety of tampering families including, e.g., NC0 and decision-tree tampering, AC0, and recently even bounded polynomial-depth tampering. We change this state of affairs by providing the first constructions of continuously non-malleable codes in the following natural settings: – Against decision-tree tampering, where, in each tampering attempt, every bit of the tampered codeword can be set arbitrarily after adaptively reading up to d locations within the input codeword. Our scheme is in the plain model, can be instantiated assuming the existence of one-way functions, and tolerates tampering by decision trees of depth d = O(n1/8), where n is the length of the codeword. Notably, this class includes NC0. – Against bounded polynomial-depth tampering, where in each tampering attempt the adversary can select any tampering function that can be computed by a circuit of bounded polynomial depth (and unbounded polynomial size). Our scheme is in the common reference string model, and can be instantiated assuming the existence of time-lock puzzles and simulation-extractable (succinct) non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs.