International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The probing security model is widely used to formally prove the security of masking schemes. Whenever a masked implementation can be proven secure in this model with a reasonable leakage rate, it is also provably secure in a realistic leakage model known as the noisy leakage model. This paper introduces a new framework for the composition of probing-secure circuits. We introduce the security notion of input-output separation (IOS) for a refresh gadget. From this notion, one can easily compose gadgets satisfying the classical probing security notion –which does not ensure composability on its own– to obtain a region probing secure circuit. Such a circuit is secure against an adversary placing up to t probes in each gadget composing the circuit, which ensures a tight reduction to the more realistic noisy leakage model. After introducing the notion and proving our composition theorem, we compare our approach to the composition approaches obtained with the (Strong) Non-Interference (S/NI) notions as well as the Probe-Isolating Non-Interference (PINI) notion. We further show that any uniform SNI gadget achieves the IOS security notion, while the converse is not true. We further describe a refresh gadget achieving the IOS property for any linear sharing with a quasilinear complexity Θ(n log n) and a O(1/ log n) leakage rate (for an n-size sharing). This refresh gadget is a simplified version of the quasilinear SNI refresh gadget proposed by Battistello, Coron, Prouff, and Zeitoun (ePrint 2016). As an application of our composition framework, we revisit the quasilinear-complexity masking scheme of Goudarzi, Joux and Rivain (Asiacrypt 2018). We improve this scheme by generalizing it to any base field (whereas the original proposal only applies to field with nth powers of unity) and by taking advantage of our composition approach. We further patch a flaw in the original security proof and extend it from the random probing model to the stronger region probing model. Finally, we present some application of this extended quasilinear masking scheme to AES and MiMC and compare the obtained performances.

This paper introduces Pyjamask, a new block cipher family and authenticated encryption proposal submitted to the NIST lightweight cryptography standardization process. Pyjamask targets side-channel resistance as one of its main goal. More precisely, it strongly minimizes the number of nonlinear gates used in its internal primitive in order to allow efficient masked implementations, especially for high-order masking in software. Compared to other block ciphers, our proposal has thus among the smallest number of binary AND computations per input bit at the time of writing. Even though Pyjamask minimizes such an important criterion, it remains rather lightweight and efficient, thanks to a general bitslice construction that enables to computation of all nonlinear gates in parallel. For authenticated encryption, we adopt the provably secure AEAD mode OCB which has been extensively studied and has the benefit to offer full parallelization. Of course, other block cipher-based modes can be considered as well if other performance profiles are to be targeted.The paper first gives the specification of the Pyjamask block cipher and the associated AEAD proposal. We also provide a detailed design rationale for the block cipher which is guided by our aim of software efficiency in the presence of high-order masking. The security of the design is analyzed against most commonly known cryptanalysis techniques. We finally describe efficient (masked) implementations in software and provide implementation results with aggressive performances for masking of very high orders (up to 128). We also provide a rough estimation of the hardware performances which remain much better than those of an AES round-based implementation.

In the last decade, several works have focused on finding the best way to model the leakage in order to obtain provably secure implementations. One of the most realistic models is the noisy leakage model, introduced in [PR13, DDF14] together with secure constructions. These works suffer from various limitations, in particular the use of ideal leak-free gates in [PR13] and an important loss (in the size of the field) in the reduction in [DDF14].In this work, we provide new strategies to prove the security of masked implementations and start by unifying the different noisiness metrics used in prior works by relating all of them to a standard notion in information theory: the pointwise mutual information. Based on this new interpretation, we define two new natural metrics and analyze the security of known compilers with respect to these metrics. In particular, we prove (1) a tighter bound for reducing the noisy leakage models to the probing model using our first new metric, (2) better bounds for amplification-based security proofs using the second metric.To support that the improvements we obtain are not only a consequence of the use of alternative metrics, we show that for concrete representation of leakage (e.g., “Hamming weight + Gaussian noise”), our approach significantly improves the parameters compared to prior works. Finally, using the Rényi divergence, we quantify concretely the advantage of an adversary in attacking a block cipher depending on the number of leakage acquisitions available to it.

Masking is a common countermeasure to secure implementations against side-channel attacks. In 2003, Ishai, Sahai, and Wagner introduced a formal security model, named $$t$$-probing model, which is now widely used to theoretically reason on the security of masked implementations. While many works have provided security proofs for small masked components, called gadgets, within this model, no formal method allowed to securely compose gadgets with a tight number of shares (namely, $$t+1$$) until recently. In 2016, Barthe et al. filled this gap with maskComp, a tool checking the security of masking schemes composed of several gadgets. This tool can achieve provable security with tight number of shares by inserting mask-refreshing gadgets at carefully selected locations. However the method is not tight in the sense that there exists some compositions of gadgets for which it cannot exhibit a flaw nor prove the security. As a result, it is overconservative and might insert more refresh gadgets than actually needed to ensure $$t$$-probing security. In this paper, we exhibit the first tool, referred to as tightPROVE, able to clearly state whether a shared circuit composed of standard gadgets (addition, multiplication, and refresh) is $$t$$-probing secure or not. Given such a composition, our tool either produces a probing-security proof (valid at any order) or exhibits a security flaw that directly implies a probing attack at a given order. Compared to maskComp, tightPROVE can drastically reduce the number of required refresh gadgets to get a probing security proof, and thus the randomness requirement for some secure shared circuits. We apply our method to a recent AES implementation secured with higher-order masking in bitslice and we show that we can save all the refresh gadgets involved in the s-box layer, which results in an significant performance gain.

Since their introduction in the late 90’s, side-channel attacks have been considered as a major threat against cryptographic implementations. This threat has raised the need for formal leakage models in which the security of implementations can be proved. At Eurocrypt 2013, Prouff and Rivain introduced the noisy leakage model which has been argued to soundly capture the physical reality of power and electromagnetic leakages. In their work, they also provide the first formal security proof for a masking scheme in the noisy leakage model. However their work has two important limitations: (i) the security proof relies on the existence of a leak-free component, (ii) the tolerated amount of information in the leakage (aka leakage rate) is of O(1 / n) where n is the security parameter (i.e. the number of shares in the underlying masking scheme). The first limitation was nicely tackled by Duc, Dziembowski and Faust one year later (Eurocrypt 2014). Their main contribution was to show a security reduction from the noisy leakage model to the conceptually simpler random-probing model. They were then able to prove the security of the well-known Ishai-Sahai-Wagner scheme (Crypto 2003) in the noisy leakage model. The second limitation was addressed in a paper by Andrychowicz, Dziembowski and Faust (Eurocrypt 2016) which makes use of a construction due to Ajtai (STOC 2011) to achieve security in the strong adaptive probing model with a leakage rate of $$O(1/\log n)$$. The authors argue that their result can be translated into the noisy leakage model with a leakage rate of O(1) by using secret sharing based on algebraic geometric codes. In terms of complexity, the protected program scales from |P| arithmetic instructions to $$\tilde{O}(|P| \, n^2)$$. According to the authors, this $$\tilde{O}(n^2)$$ blow-up could be reduced to $$\tilde{O}(n)$$ using packed secret sharing but no details are provided. Moreover, such an improvement would only be possible for a program of width at least linear in n. The issue of designing an explicit scheme achieving $$\tilde{O}(n)$$ complexity blow-up for any arithmetic program is hence left open.In this paper, we tackle the above issue: we show how to securely compute in the presence of noisy leakage with a leakage rate $$\tilde{O}(1)$$ and complexity blow-up $$\tilde{O}(n)$$. Namely, we introduce a transform that turns any program P composed of arithmetic instructions on some filed $$\mathbb {F}$$ into a (functionally equivalent) program $$\varPi $$ composed of $$|\varPi | = O(|P| n \log n)$$ arithmetic instructions which can tolerate some (quasi-constant) amount of noisy leakage on its internal variables (while revealing negligible information). We use a polynomial encoding allowing quasilinear multiplication based on the fast Number Theoretic Transform (NTT). We first show that our scheme is secure in the random-probing model with leakage rate $$O(1/\log n)$$. Using the reduction by Duc et al. this result can be translated in the noisy leakage model with a $$O(1/|\mathbb {F}|^2 \log n)$$ leakage rate. However, a straight application of this reduction is not satisfactory since our construction requires $$|\mathbb {F}| = O(n)$$. In order to bypass this issue (which is shared with the construction of Andrychowicz et al.), we provide a generic security reduction from the noisy leakage model at the logical-instruction level to the random-probing model at the arithmetic level. This reduction allows us to prove the security of our construction in the noisy leakage model with leakage rate $$\tilde{O}(1)$$.

Masking is a widespread countermeasure to protect implementations of block-ciphers against side-channel attacks. Several masking schemes have been proposed in the literature that rely on the efficient decomposition of the underlying s-box(es). We propose a generalized decomposition method for s-boxes that encompasses several previously proposed methods while providing new trade-offs. It allows to evaluate $$n\lambda $$ -bit to $$m\lambda $$ -bit s-boxes for any integers $$n,m,\lambda \ge 1$$ by seeing it a sequence of mn-variate polynomials over $$\mathbb {F}_{2^{\lambda }}$$ and by trying to minimize the number of multiplications over $$\mathbb {F}_{2^{\lambda }}$$ .