Formal verification of side-channel countermeasures via elementary circuit transformations

Abstract

We describe a technique to formally verify the security of masked implementations against side-channel attacks, based on elementary circuit transforms. We describe two complementary approaches: a generic approach for the formal verification of any circuit, but for small attack orders only, and a specialized approach for the verification of specific circuits, but at any order. We also show how to generate security proofs automatically, for simple circuits. We describe the implementation of CheckMasks, a formal verification tool for side-channel countermeasures. Using this tool, we formally verify the security of the Rivain-Prouff countermeasure for AES, and also the recent Boolean to arithmetic conversion algorithms from CHES 2017.