Theory and practice of a leakage resilient masking scheme

Abstract

A recent trend in cryptography is to formally prove the leakage resilience of cryptographic implementations - that is, one formally shows that a scheme remains provably secure even in the presence of side channel leakage. Although many of the proposed schemes are secure in a surprisingly strong model, most of them are unfortunately rather inefficient and come without practical security evaluations nor implementation attempts. In this work, we take a further step towards closing the gap between theoretical leakage resilient cryptography and more practice-oriented research. In particular, we show that masking countermeasures based on the inner product do not only exhibit strong theoretical leakage resilience, but moreover provide better practical security or efficiency than earlier masking countermeasures. We demonstrate the feasibility of inner product masking by giving a secured implementation of the AES for an 8-bit processor. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2012.