Security of Constant Weight Countermeasures

This paper investigates the security of constant weight countermeasures, which aim to produce indistinguishable leakage from sensitive variables and intermediate variables, assuming a constant Hamming distance and/or Hamming weight leakages. To investigate the security of recent countermeasures, contrary to many related studies, we assume that the coefficients of the simulated leakage models follow a normal distribution so that we may construct a model with approximately realistic leakages. First, using our simulated leakage model, we demonstrate security holes in these previous countermeasures. Subsequently, in contrast to the hypotheses presented in previous studies, we confirm the resistance of these countermeasures to a standard correlation power analysis (CPA). However, these countermeasures can allow a bitwise CPA to leak a sensitive variable with only a few thousand traces.