An Asynchronous FPGA Block with Its Tech-Mapping Algorithm Dedicated to Security Applications

This paper presents an FPGA tech-mapping algorithm dedicated to security applications. The objective is to implement—on a full-custom asynchronous FPGA—secured functions that need to be robust against side-channel attacks (SCAs). The paper briefly describes the architecture of this FPGA that has been designed and prototyped in CMOS 65 nm to target various styles of asynchronous logic including 2-phase and 4-phase communication protocols and 1-of-ndata encoding. This programmable architecture is designed to be electrically balanced in order to fit the security requirements. It allows fair comparisons between different styles of asynchronous implementations. In order to illustrate the FPGA flexibility and security, a case study has been implemented in 2-phase and 4-phase Quasi-Delay-Insensitive (QDI) logic.

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Side-channel attacks against the human brain: the PIN code case study (extended version)

Brain Informatics ◽

10.1186/s40708-018-0090-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Joseph Lange ◽

Clément Massart ◽

André Mouraux ◽

François-Xavier Standaert

Keyword(s):

Human Brain ◽

Side Channel ◽

Extended Version ◽

Side Channel Attacks

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Side-Channel Attacks Against the Human Brain: The PIN Code Case Study

Constructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ◽

10.1007/978-3-319-64647-3_11 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 171-189 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Joseph Lange ◽

Clément Massart ◽

André Mouraux ◽

Francois-Xavier Standaert

Keyword(s):

Human Brain ◽

Side Channel ◽

Side Channel Attacks

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Transparency order versus confusion coefficient: a case study of NIST lightweight cryptography S-Boxes

Cybersecurity ◽

10.1186/s42400-021-00099-1 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Huizhong Li ◽

Guang Yang ◽

Jingdian Ming ◽

Yongbin Zhou ◽

Chengbin Jin

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Side Channel ◽

Side Channel Attacks ◽

Lightweight Cryptography ◽

Security Assurance ◽

Channel Resistance ◽

Cryptographic Algorithms ◽

Transparency Order ◽

Comprehensive Study

AbstractSide-channel resistance is nowadays widely accepted as a crucial factor in deciding the security assurance level of cryptographic implementations. In most cases, non-linear components (e.g. S-Boxes) of cryptographic algorithms will be chosen as primary targets of side-channel attacks (SCAs). In order to measure side-channel resistance of S-Boxes, three theoretical metrics are proposed and they are reVisited transparency order (VTO), confusion coefficients variance (CCV), and minimum confusion coefficient (MCC), respectively. However, the practical effectiveness of these metrics remains still unclear. Taking the 4-bit and 8-bit S-Boxes used in NIST Lightweight Cryptography candidates as concrete examples, this paper takes a comprehensive study of the applicability of these metrics. First of all, we empirically investigate the relations among three metrics for targeted S-boxes, and find that CCV is almost linearly correlated with VTO, while MCC is inconsistent with the other two. Furthermore, in order to verify which metric is more effective in which scenarios, we perform simulated and practical experiments on nine 4-bit S-Boxes under the non-profiled attacks and profiled attacks, respectively. The experiments show that for quantifying side-channel resistance of S-Boxes under non-profiled attacks, VTO and CCV are more reliable while MCC fails. We also obtain an interesting observation that none of these three metrics is suitable for measuring the resistance of S-Boxes against profiled SCAs. Finally, we try to verify whether these metrics can be applied to compare the resistance of S-Boxes with different sizes. Unfortunately, all of them are invalid in this scenario.

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Side-Channel Protections for Picnic Signatures

IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems ◽

10.46586/tches.v2021.i4.239-282 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 239-282

Author(s):

Diego F. Aranha ◽

Sebastian Berndt ◽

Thomas Eisenbarth ◽

Okan Seker ◽

Akira Takahashi ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Hash Function ◽

Proof System ◽

Side Channel ◽

Side Channel Attacks ◽

Zero Knowledge ◽

Signature Schemes ◽

First Order ◽

The Third ◽

Zero Knowledge Proof

We study masking countermeasures for side-channel attacks against signature schemes constructed from the MPC-in-the-head paradigm, specifically when the MPC protocol uses preprocessing. This class of signature schemes includes Picnic, an alternate candidate in the third round of the NIST post-quantum standardization project. The only previously known approach to masking MPC-in-the-head signatures suffers from interoperability issues and increased signature sizes. Further, we present a new attack to demonstrate that known countermeasures are not sufficient when the MPC protocol uses a preprocessing phase, as in Picnic3.We overcome these challenges by showing how to mask the underlying zero-knowledge proof system due to Katz–Kolesnikov–Wang (CCS 2018) for any masking order, and by formally proving that our approach meets the standard security notions of non-interference for masking countermeasures. As a case study, we apply our masking technique to Picnic. We then implement different masked versions of Picnic signing providing first order protection for the ARM Cortex M4 platform, and quantify the overhead of these different masking approaches. We carefully analyze the side-channel risk of hashing operations, and give optimizations that reduce the CPU cost of protecting hashing in Picnic by a factor of five. The performance penalties of the masking countermeasures ranged from 1.8 to 5.5, depending on the degree of masking applied to hash function invocations.

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TEDT, a Leakage-Resist AEAD Mode for High Physical Security Applications

IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems ◽

10.46586/tches.v2020.i1.256-320 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 256-320 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Francesco Berti ◽

Chun Guo ◽

Olivier Pereira ◽

Thomas Peters ◽

François-Xavier Standaert

Keyword(s):

Energy Cost ◽

Energy Efficient ◽

Low Energy ◽

Side Channel ◽

Authenticated Encryption ◽

Side Channel Attacks ◽

Security Applications ◽

Leakage Resistance ◽

Encryption And Decryption ◽

Associated Data

We propose TEDT, a new Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) mode leveraging Tweakable Block Ciphers (TBCs). TEDT provides the following features: (i) It offers full leakage-resistance, that is, it limits the exploitability of physical leakages via side-channel attacks, even if these leakages happen during every message encryption and decryption operation. Moreover, the leakage integrity bound is asymptotically optimal in the multi-user setting. (ii) It offers nonce misuse-resilience, that is, the repetition of nonces does not impact the security of ciphertexts produced with fresh nonces. (iii) It can be implemented with a remarkably low energy cost when strong resistance to side-channel attacks is needed, supports online encryption and handles static and incremental associated data efficiently. Concretely, TEDT encourages so-called leveled implementations, in which two TBCs are implemented: the first one needs strong and energy demanding protections against side-channel attacks but is used in a limited way, while the other only requires weak and energy-efficient protections and performs the bulk of the computation. As a result, TEDT leads to more energy-efficient implementations compared to traditional AEAD schemes, whose side-channel security requires to uniformly protect every (T)BC execution.

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