Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2018/597

Consolidating Security Notions in Hardware Masking

Lauren De Meyer and Begül Bilgin and Oscar Reparaz

Abstract: In this paper, we revisit the security conditions of masked hardware implementations. We describe a new, succinct, information-theoretic condition called d-glitch immunity which is both necessary and sufficient for security in the presence of glitches. We show that this single condition includes, but is not limited to, previous security notions such as those used in higher-order threshold implementations and in abstractions using ideal gates. As opposed to these previously known necessary conditions, our new condition is also sufficient. On the other hand, it excludes avoidable notions such as uniformity. We also treat the notion of (strong) non-interference from an information-theoretic point-of-view in order to unify the different security concepts and pave the way to the verification of composability in the presence of glitches. We conclude the paper by demonstrating how the condition can be used as an efficient and highly generic flaw detection mechanism for a variety of functions and schemes based on different operations.

Category / Keywords: implementation / Glitches,DPA,SCA,Verification,TI,SNI,Non-Completeness, Mutual Information, Information-theory, d-probing, Glitch Immunity

Original Publication (in the same form): IACR-CHES-2019

Date: received 9 Jun 2018, last revised 12 Apr 2019

Contact author: lauren demeyer at esat kuleuven be

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20190412:100519 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2018/597