SPARX - A side-channel protected processor for ARX-based cryptography

ARX-based cryptographic algorithms are composed of only three elemental operations - addition, rotation and exclusive or - which are mixed to ensure adequate confusion and diffusion properties. While ARX-ciphers can easily be protected against timing attacks, special measures like masking have to be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inDesign, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), 2017 pp. 990 - 995
Main Authors Bache, Florian, Schneider, Tobias, Moradi, Amir, Giineysu, Tim
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published EDAA 01.03.2017
Subjects
Adders
Ciphers
Computer architecture
Hardware
Registers
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Summary:ARX-based cryptographic algorithms are composed of only three elemental operations - addition, rotation and exclusive or - which are mixed to ensure adequate confusion and diffusion properties. While ARX-ciphers can easily be protected against timing attacks, special measures like masking have to be taken in order to prevent power and electromagnetic analysis. In this paper we present a processor architecture for ARX-based cryptography, that intrinsically guarantees first-order SCA resistance of any implemented algorithm. This is achieved by protecting the complete data path using a Boolean masking scheme with three shares. We evaluate our security claims by mapping an ARX-algorithm to the proposed architecture and using the common leakage detection methodology based on Student's i-test to certify the side-channel resistance of our processor.
ISSN:1558-1101
DOI:10.23919/DATE.2017.7927135