Affine Masking against Higher-Order Side Channel Analysis [chapter]

Guillaume Fumaroli, Ange Martinelli, Emmanuel Prouff, Matthieu Rivain
2011 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
In the last decade, an effort has been made by the research community to find efficient ways to thwart side channel analysis (SCA) against physical implementations of cryptographic algorithms. A common countermeasure for implementations of block ciphers is Boolean masking which randomizes the variables to be protected by the bitwise addition of one or several random value(s). However, advanced techniques called higher-order SCA attacks exist that overcome such a countermeasure. These attacks
more » ... greatly favored by the very nature of Boolean masking. In this paper, we revisit the affine masking initially introduced by Von Willich in 2001 as an alternative to Boolean masking. We show how to apply it to AES at the cost of a small timing overhead compared to Boolean masking. We then conduct an in-depth analysis pinpointing the leakage reduction implied by affine masking. Our results clearly show that the proposed scheme provides an excellent performance-security trade-off to protect AES against higher-order SCA.
doi:10.1007/978-3-642-19574-7_18 fatcat:puaqrbogunfslfqlh57oqlqlk4