How to Decide Selection Functions for Power Analysis: From the Viewpoint of Hardware Architecture of Block Ciphers

In this paper we first demonstrate that effective selection functions in power analysis attacks change depending on circuit architectures of a block cipher. We then conclude that the most resistant architecture on its own, in the case of the loop architecture, has two data registers have separate roles: one for storing the plaintext and ciphertext, and the other for storing intermediate values. There, the pre-whitening operation is placed at the output of the former register. The architecture allows the narrowest range of selection functions and thereby has resistance against ordinary CPA. Thus, we can easily defend against attacks by ordinary CPA at the architectural level, whereas we cannot against DPA. Secondly, we propose a new technique called “self-templates” in order to raise the accuracy of evaluation of DPA-based attacks. Self-templates enable to differentiate meaningful selection functions for DPA-based attacks without any strong assumption as in the template attack. We also present the results of attacks to an AES co-processor on an ASIC and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.