CryptoDB
Analysis and Comparison of Table-based Arithmetic to Boolean Masking
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| Abstract: | Masking is a popular technique to protect cryptographic implementations against side-channel attacks and comes in several variants including Boolean and arithmetic masking. Some masked implementations require conversion between these two variants, which is increasingly the case for masking of post-quantum encryption and signature schemes. One way to perform Arithmetic to Boolean (A2B) mask conversion is a table-based approach first introduced by Coron and Tchulkine, and later corrected and adapted by Debraize in CHES 2012. In this work, we show both analytically and experimentally that the table-based A2B conversion algorithm proposed by Debraize does not achieve the claimed resistance against differential power analysis due to a non-uniform masking of an intermediate variable. This non-uniformity is hard to find analytically but leads to clear leakage in experimental validation. To address the non-uniform masking issue, we propose two new A2B conversions: one that maintains efficiency at the cost of additional memory and one that trades efficiency for a reduced memory footprint. We give analytical and experimental evidence for their security, and will make their implementations, which are shown to be free from side-channel leakage in 100.000 power traces collected on the ARM Cortex-M4, available online. We conclude that when designing side-channel protection mechanisms, it is of paramount importance to perform both a theoretical analysis and an experimental validation of the method. |
Video from TCHES 2021
BibTeX
@article{tches-2021-31285,
title={Analysis and Comparison of Table-based Arithmetic to Boolean Masking},
journal={IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems},
publisher={Ruhr-Universität Bochum},
volume={2021, Issue 3},
pages={275-297},
url={https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/8975},
doi={10.46586/tches.v2021.i3.275-297},
author={Michiel Van Beirendonck and Jan-Pieter D’Anvers and Ingrid Verbauwhede},
year=2021
}