Paper 2014/411

Combining Leakage-Resilient PRFs and Shuffling (Towards Bounded Security for Small Embedded Devices)

Vincent Grosso, Romain Poussier, François-Xavier Standaert, and Lubos Gaspar

Abstract

Combining countermeasures is usually assumed to be the best way to protect embedded devices against side-channel attacks. These combinations are at least expected to increase the number of measurements of successful attacks to some reasonable extent, and at best to guarantee a bounded time complexity independent of the number of measurements. This latter guarantee, only possible in the context of leakage-resilient constructions, was only reached either for stateful (pseudo-random generator) constructions, or large parallel implementations so far. In this paper, we describe a first proposal of stateless (pseudo-random function) construction, for which we have strong hints that security bounded implementations are reachable under the constraints of small embedded devices. Our proposal essentially combines the well-known shuffling countermeasure with a tweaked pseudo-random function introduced at CHES 2012. We first detail is performances. Then we analyze it against standard differential power analysis and discuss the different parameters influencing its security bounds. Finally, we put forward that its implementation in 8-bit microcontrollers can provide a better security vs. performance tradeoff than state-of-the art (combinations of) countermeasures.