Trade-Offs for Threshold Implementations Illustrated on AES

Begul Bilgin, Benedikt Gierlichs, Svetla Nikova, Ventzislav Nikov, Vincent Rijmen
2015 IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems  
Embedded cryptographic devices are vulnerable to power analysis attacks. Threshold Implementations provide provable security against first-order power analysis attacks for hardware and software implementations. Like masking, the approach relies on secret sharing but it differs in the implementation of logic functions. While masking can fail to provide protection due to glitches in the circuit, Threshold Implementations rely on few assumptions about the hardware and are fully compatible with
more » ... dard design flows. We investigate two important properties of Threshold Implementations in detail and point out interesting trade-offs between circuit area and randomness requirements. We propose two new Threshold Implementations of AES that, starting from a common previously published implementation, illustrate possible trade-offs. We provide concrete ASIC implementation results for all three designs using the same library, and we evaluate the practical security of all three designs on the same FPGA platform. Our analysis allows us to directly compare the security provided by the different trade-offs, and to quantify the associated hardware cost.
doi:10.1109/tcad.2015.2419623 fatcat:jephg2gasncq7e4dnk6hdfq6ue