SCA resistance analysis on FPGA implementations of sponge based MAC − PHOTON

Abstract

PHOTON is a lightweight hash function which was proposed by Guo et al. in CRYPTO 2011. This is used in low-resource ubiquitous computing devices such as RFID tags, wireless sensor nodes, smart cards and mobile devices. PHOTON is built using sponge construction and it provides a new MAC function called MAC − PHOTON. This paper deals with FPGA implementations of MAC − PHOTON and their side-channel attack (SCA) resistance. First, we describe three architectures of the MAC − PHOTON based on the concepts of iterative, folding and unrolling, and we provide their performance results on the Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs. Second, we analyse security of the MAC−PHOTON against side-channel attack using a SASEBO-GII development board. Finally, we present an analysis of its Threshold Implementation (TI) and discuss its resistance against first-order power analysis attacks.