Composite fields against side channel analysis for the advanced encryption standard

Secure implementations have two primary goals: being optimized (with respect to area, latency, power, or throughput) and secure against physical attacks, such as side channel analysis. Composite fields have been often proposed as a solution for the former problem, allowing implementations of the Advanced Encryption Standard targeted at resource constrained applications: additionally, they may also be a countermeasure against passive analysis and make an attack more difficult. In this paper, we present an AES design fully implemented on composite fields and evaluate its robustness against Differential Power Analysis.