A Highly-Secured Arithmetic Hiding cum Look-Up Table (AHLUT) based S-Box for AES-128 Implementation
Ali Akbar Pammu, Kwen‐Siong Chong, Bah‐Hwee Gwee · Advances in Science Technology and Engineering Systems Journal · 2017
Side-Channel Attack (SCA) is an effective method in extracting the secret key of cryptographic algorithms by correlating the physical leakage information with the processed data. In this paper, we propose an arithmetic hiding cum Look-up Table (AHLUT) based Substitution-Box (S-Box) in AES-128 cryptographic algorithm implementation to countermeasure against SCA. There are three key features in our proposed AHLUT S-Box. First, the arithmetic hiding performs four types of arithmetic operations such that their total physical leakage information sufficiently overshadows the correlated physical leakage information of the S-Box operation. This is to reduce the correlation of the AES-128 physical leakage information with the processed data. Second, the AHLUT S-Box pre-stores all the 256 bytes of possible output values based on the conventional S-Box and selects a corresponding output value with respect to the input accordingly. In this context, it dissipates significantly lower power when compared to the conventional S-Box which performs multiplication inversion and affine transformation. Third, we propose a methodology to determine a minimum number of the arithmetic operations to sufficiently overshadow the physical leakage information of the S-Box operation. Based on the measurement results of performing AES-128 algorithm on Sakura-X FPGA encryption-board and in term of power dissipation, our proposed AHLUT S-Box dissipates 1.6mW and features 11.56× lower power dissipation than the conventional S-Box. In term of security which is based on Correlation Power Analysis attack, it requires 73× more power traces to reveal the secret key for our proposed AHLUT S-Box than the conventional S-Box. As for the non-invasive Correlation Electromagnetic Analysis attack, it requires 25× more electromagnetic traces for our proposed AHLUT S-Box than the conventional S-Box.