skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


  • NSF Public Access
  • Search Results
  • Side-channel Resistant Implementations of a Novel Lightweight Authenticated Cipher with Application to Hardware Security
Title: Side-channel Resistant Implementations of a Novel Lightweight Authenticated Cipher with Application to Hardware Security
Lightweight authenticated ciphers are crucial in many resource-constrained applications, including hardware security. To protect Intellectual Property (IPs) from theft and reverse-engineering, multiple obfuscation methods have been developed. An essential component of such schemes is the need for secrecy and authenticity of the obfuscation keys. Such keys may need to be exchanged through the unprotected channels, and their recovery attempted using side-channel attacks. However, the use of the current AES-GCM standard to protected key exchange requires a substantial area and power overhead. NIST is currently coordinating a standardization process to select lightweight algorithms for resource-constrained applications. Although security against cryptanalysis is paramount, cost, performance, and resistance to side-channel attacks are among the most important selection criteria. Since the cost of protection against side-channel attacks is a function of the algorithm, quantifying this cost is necessary for estimating its cost and performance in real-world applications. In this work, we investigate side-channel resistant lightweight implementations of an authenticated cipher TinyJAMBU, one of ten finalists in the current NIST LWC standardization process. Our results demonstrate that these implementations achieve robust security against side-channel attacks while keeping the area and power consumption significantly lower than it is possible using the current standards.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1718434
PAR ID:
10299085
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
GLSVLSI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 on Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI
Page Range / eLocation ID:
229 to 234
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; (, 2020 30th International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL))
    null (Ed.)
    Lightweight cryptography offers viable security solutions for resource constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, IoT devices have implementation vulnerabilities such as side channel attacks (SCA), where observation of physical phenomena associated with device operations can reveal sensitive internal contents. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has called for lightweight cryptographic solutions to process authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD), and is evaluating candidates for suitability in a Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) Standardization Process. Two Round 2 candidate variants, COMET-CHAM and SCHWAEMM, use Addition-Rotation-XOR (ARX) primitives. However, ARX ciphers are known to be costly to protect against certain SCA. In this work we implement side channel protected versions of COMET-CHAM and SCHWAEMM using register transfer level design. Identical protection schemes consisting of a threshold implementation (TI)-protected Kogge-Stone adder are adopted. Resistance to power side channel analysis is verified on an Artix-7 FPGA target device. Implementations comply with the Hardware API for Lightweight Cryptography, and use a custom-designed extension of the Development Package for the Hardware API for Lightweight Cryptography which enables test and evaluation of side channel resistant designs. We compare side channel protection costs of the two candidates against each other, against their unprotected counterparts, and against previous side channel protected AEAD implementations. COMET-CHAM is shown to consume less area and power, while SCHWAEMM has higher throughput and throughput to area ratio, and is more energy efficient. On average, the costs of protecting these ciphers against SCA are 32% more in area and 38% more in power, compared to the average protection costs for a large selection of previously-evaluated ciphers of similar implementation. Our results highlight the costs involved in implementing side channel protected ARX-ciphers, and help to inform NIST LWC late round and final portfolio selections. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, 2019 International Conference on ReConFigurable Computing and FPGAs (ReConFig), Cancun, Mexico)
    Lightweight implementations of cryptographic algorithms must be evaluated in terms of security, cost, and performance before their deployment in practical applications. The availability of open-source platforms for such evaluation saves researchers' time and increases reproducibility of results. In this work, we improve upon the previous version of the Flexible Opensource workBench fOr Side-channel analysis (FO-BOS) to introduce “FOBOS2,” and utilize it to perform such evaluation tasks for hardware implementations of authenticated ciphers, with special focus on candidates submitted to the NIST Lightweight Cryptography standardization process. We perform power measurements on Artix7 FPGA, and countermeasure evaluation of lightweight hardware implementations of selected NIST Lightweight Cryptography Round-2 candidates and the current NIST standard AES-GCM on the Spartan6 and Artix7 FPGAs. Our results show that Ascon consumes the least power at 50 MHz, and has the lowest change in dynamic power per increase in frequency, while GIFT-COFB consumes the least energy-per-bit. We also show that side-channel countermeasures applied to implementations of Ascon and AES-GCM are effective using leakage detection tests. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; (, 2018 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology)
    Authenticated ciphers potentially provide resource savings and security improvements over the joint use of secret-key ciphers and message authentication codes. The CAESAR competition aims to choose the most suitable authenticated ciphers for several categories of applications, including a lightweight use case, for which the primary criteria are performance in resource constrained devices, and ease of protection against side channel attacks (SCA). Recently, two of the candidates from this category, ACORN and Ascon, were selected as CAESAR contest finalists. In this research, we compare two SCA-resistant FPGA implementations of ACORN and Ascon, where one set of implementations has area consumption nearly equivalent to the defacto standard AES-GCM, and the other set has throughput (TP) close to that of AES-GCM. The results show that protected implementations of ACORN and Ascon, with area consumption less than but close to AES-GCM, have 23.3 and 2.5 times, respectively, the TP of AES-GCM. Likewise, implementations of ACORN and Ascon with TP greater than but close to AES-GCM, consume 18% and 74% of the area, respectively, of AES-GCM. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, 2025 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy)
    As post-quantum cryptography (PQC) nears standardization and eventual deployment, it is increasingly important to understand the security of the implementations of selected schemes. In this paper, we conduct such an investigation, uncovering concerning findings about many of the finalists of the NIST PQC standardization competition. Specifically, we show Rowhammer-based attacks on the Kyber and BIKE Key Exchange Mechanisms and the Dilithium Digital Signature scheme that enable complete recovery of the secret key with only a moderate amount of effort – no supercomputers, or months of precomputation. Moreover, we experimentally carry out our attacks using a combination of Rowhammer, performance degradation, and memory massaging techniques, showing that our attacks are practically feasible. Our results show that such side-channel based attacks are a critical concern and need to be considered when new cryptographic schemes are standardized, when standard implementations are developed, and when instances are deployed. We conclude with recommendations on implementation techniques that harden cryptographic schemes against Rowhammer attacks. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; (, 2018 IEEE 26th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM))
    Authenticated ciphers offer potential benefits to resource-constrained devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). The CAESAR competition seeks optimal authenticated ciphers based on several criteria, including performance in resource-constrained (i.e., low-area, low-power, and low-energy) hardware. Although the competition specified a "lightweight" use case for Round 3, most hardware submissions to Round 3 were not lightweight implementations, in that they employed architectures optimized for best throughput-to-area (TP/A) ratio, and used the Pre- and PostProcessor modules from the CAESAR Hardware (HW) Development Package designed for high-speed applications. In this research, we provide true lightweight implementations of selected ciphers (ACORN, NORX, CLOC- AES, SILC-AES, and SILC-LED). These implementations use an improved version of the CAESAR HW Development Package designed for lightweight applications, and are fully compliant with the CAESAR HW Application Programming Interface for Authenticated Ciphers. Our lightweight implementations achieve an average of 55% reduction in area and 40% reduction in power compared to their corresponding high-speed versions. Although the average energy per bit of lightweight ciphers increases by a factor of 3.6, the lightweight version of NORX actually uses 47% less energy per bit than its corresponding high-speed implementation. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email