Dynamic Logic Reconfiguration Based Side-Channel Protection of AES and Serpent

Abstract

Dynamic logic reconfiguration is a concept which allows for efficient on-the-fly modifications of combinational circuit behaviour in both ASIC and FPGA devices. The reconfiguration of Boolean functions is achieved by modification of their generators (e.g. shift register-based look-up tables) and it can be controlled from within the chip, without the necessity of any external intervention. This hardware polymorphism can be utilized for the implementation of side-channel attack countermeasures, as demonstrated by Sasdrich et al. for the lightweight cipher PRESENT. In this work we adopt these countermeasures to two of the AES finalists, namely Rijndael and Serpent. Just like PRESENT, both Rijndael and Serpent are block ciphers based on a substitution-permutation network. We describe the countermeasures and adjustments necessary to protect these ciphers using the resources available in modern Xilinx FPGAs. We describe our VHDL implementations and evaluate the side-channel leakage and effectiveness of different countermeasure combinations using a methodology based on Welch's t-test. We did not detect any significant leakage from the fully protected versions of our implementations. We show that the countermeasures proposed by Sasdrich et al. are, with some modifications compared to the protected PRESENT implementation, successfully applicable to AES and Serpent.