Low-Cost First-Order Secure Boolean Masking in Glitchy Hardware
Dilip Kumar S. V., Josep Balasch, Benedikt Gierlichs, Ingrid M.R. Verbauwhede · IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security · 2025
We describe how to securely implement the masked logical AND of two bits in hardware in the presence of glitches without the need for fresh randomness, and we provide guidelines for the composition of circuits. As a case study, we design, implement, and evaluate masked DES cores. We focus on first-order secure Boolean masking and do not aim for provable security. Our goal is a practically relevant trade-off between area, latency, randomness cost, and security. We provide two low-cost solutions. Our first solution focuses on strong security while simultaneously aiming for low implementation costs. The resulting DES engine shows no evidence of first-order leakage in a non-specific leakage assessment with 50M traces. Our second solution follows the opposite approach: we focus on lowering implementation costs, latency to be specific, while not sacrificing much on security. Our low-latency DES engine exhibits signs of first-order leakage only after approximately 15M traces.