PFD—A Flexible Higher-Order Masking Scheme

Abstract

Based on the idea of secret sharing, masking is one of the most popular countermeasure to prevent side channel attacks (SCAs). Despite the redundant time and resource consumption, the existing masking schemes have constant speed and resources, and thus unsuitable for different applications with variable demand for time or space. Motivated by the reconfiguration technology of programmable hardware and disjunctive normal form expression of any logic function, we define a random variable logic circuit to reach the same security for any-order masking schemes. During the encryption, we induce random sequences and utilize them as configuration sequences to generate variable logic circuits, whose results are independent from the original and divided into several shares. We call our new approach polynomial function division (PFD) masking. Furthermore, we analyze the effectiveness and proof the security of PFD in theory. Our experiments using PFD on the advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm show that the space complexity is almost as small as an implementation of the original AES without any countermeasure. Moreover, due to the flexible structure of PFD, the cost-to-efficiency ratio of PFD is much lower than state-of-the art in software, and its flexibility is coin with the reconfigurable chip.