2016 Volume E99.A Issue 10 Pages 1833-1842
Power analysis exploits the leaked information gained from cryptographic devices including, but not limited to, power consumption generated during cryptographic operations. If a number of power traces are given to an attacker, it is possible to reveal a cryptographic key efficiently, sometimes within a few minutes, using various statistical methods. In this sense, software countermeasures including higher-order masking or software dual-rail with precharge logic have been proposed to produce randomized or constant power consumption during the key-dependent operations. However, they have critical disadvantages in terms of computational time and security. In this paper, we propose a new solution called “one-bit to four-bit dual conversion” for enhanced security against power analysis. For an exemplary embodiment of the proposed scheme, we apply it to an AES implementation and demonstrate its security and performance. The overall costs are approximately 148KB memory space for the lookup tables and about a 3-fold increase in execution time than the straightforward implementation of AES.