Silent Simon: A threshold implementation under 100 slices

Aria Shahverdi, Mostafa Taha, Thomas Eisenbarth

Abstract

Lightweight Cryptography aims at achieving security comparable to conventional cryptography at a much lower cost. Simon is a lightweight alternative to AES, as it shares same cryptographic parameters, but has been shown to be extremely area-efficient on FPGAs. However, in the embedded setting, protection against side channel analysis is often required. In this work we present a threshold implementation of Simon. The proposed core splits the information between three shares and achieves provable security against first order side-channel attacks. The core can be implemented in less than 100 slices of a low-cost FPGA, making it the world smallest threshold implementation of a block-cipher. Hence, the proposed core perfectly suits highly-constrained embedded systems including sensor nodes and RFIDs. Security of the proposed core is validated by provable arguments as well as practical DPA attacks and tests for leakage quantification.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2015 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST)
Number of pages6
PublisherIEEE
Publication date02.07.2015
Pages1-6
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4673-7421-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 02.07.2015
Event2015 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) - Washington, United States
Duration: 05.05.201507.05.2015

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