On the Vulnerability of Hardware Masking in Practical Implementations
Haotian Dai, Selçuk Köse · 2021
Masking is a widely used technique to improve security against side channel analysis (SCA) by dividing sensitive information into multiple shares. One of the primary assumptions in masking is that the leakage of each share is independent of the other shares. A successful attack by utilizing the leakage from a single share cannot be performed unless the leakage information from all of the shares is available. When implementing hardware masking, this assumption of independent shares, however, is no longer valid when different shares are connected to the same power delivery network. In this paper, the relationship between different masking shares are quantitatively analyzed. The impact of the power/ground noise in the shared power delivery network on security of masking is investigated. By analyzing the behavior of dependence based on different physical factors, certain insights are presented to improve the security of hardware masking in practical implementations.