Paper 2025/179

Higher-Order Deterministic Masking with Application to Ascon

Vahid Jahandideh, Radboud University Nijmegen
Bart Mennink, Radboud University Nijmegen
Lejla Batina, Radboud University Nijmegen
Abstract

Side-channel attacks (SCAs) pose a significant threat to the implementations of lightweight ciphers, particularly in resource-constrained environments where masking—the primary countermeasure—is constrained by tight resource limitations. This makes it crucial to reduce the resource and randomness requirements of masking schemes. In this work, we investigate an approach to minimize the randomness complexity of masking algorithms. Specifically, we explore the theoretical foundations of deterministic higher-order masking, which relies solely on offline randomness present in the initial input shares and eliminates the need for online (fresh) randomness during internal computations. We demonstrate the feasibility of deterministic masking for ciphers such as Ascon, showing that their diffusion layer can act as a refresh subcircuit. This ensures that, up to a threshold number, probes placed in different rounds remain independent. Based on this observation, we propose composition theorems for deterministic masking schemes. On the practical side, we extend the proof of first- and second-order probing security for Ascon’s protected permutation from a single round to an arbitrary number of rounds

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Side-ChannelMaskingRandomness ComplexityAscon
Contact author(s)
v jahandideh @ cs ru nl
b mennink @ cs ru nl
lejla @ cs ru nl
History
2025-02-07: approved
2025-02-06: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2025/179
License
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
CC BY-SA

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/179,
      author = {Vahid Jahandideh and Bart Mennink and Lejla Batina},
      title = {Higher-Order Deterministic Masking with Application to Ascon},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/179},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/179}
}
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