Design for Security of Block Cipher S-Boxes to Resist Differential Power Attacks

Abstract

This paper proposes an S-box construction of AES-128 block cipher which is more robust to differential power analysis (DPA) attacks than that of AES-128 implemented with Rijndael S-box while having similar cryptographic properties. The proposed S-box avoids use of countermeasures for thwarting DPA attacks thus consuming lesser area and power in the embedded hardware and still being more DPA resistive compared to Rijndael S-box. The design has been prototyped on Xilinx FPGA Spartan device XC3S400-4PQ208 and the power traces of the two different running AES-128 algorithms with the proposed and Rijndael S-boxes have been analyzed separately. The experimental results of the FPGA implementations show a lesser gate count consumption and increased throughput for the AES-128 with proposed S-box as that when implemented with Rijndael S-box on the same FPGA device. The requirement of higher number of power traces to perform DPA analysis on AES-128 with RAIN S-box as compared to that implemented with Rijndael S-box is an experimental validation of the theoretical claim of lower transparency order computed for RAIN S-box as being more DPA resistant than that of Rijndael S-box.