A look into SIMON from a side-channel perspective

Author

Bhasin, Shubhendu ; Graba, Tarik ; Danger, Jean-Luc ; Najm, Zakaria

Author_Institution

TELECOM-ParisTech, Paris, France

fYear

2014

fDate

6-7 May 2014

Firstpage

56

Lastpage

59

Abstract

SIMON is a lightweight block cipher, specially designed for resource constrained devices that was recently presented by the National Security Agency (NSA). This paper deals with a hardware implementation of this algorithm from a side-channel point of view as it is a prime concern for embedded systems. We present the implementation of SIMON on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA and propose a low-overhead countermeasure using first-order Boolean masking exploiting the simplistic construction of SIMON. Finally we evaluate the side-channel resistance of both implementations.

Keywords

Boolean algebra; cryptography; field programmable gate arrays; SIMON; Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA; embedded system; first-order Boolean masking; lightweight block cipher; resource constrained device; side-channel perspective; side-channel resistance; Ciphers; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Magnetohydrodynamics; Registers; Table lookup; Countermeasures; Lightweight Cryptography; SIMON; Side-Channel Analysis;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), 2014 IEEE International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Arlington, VA

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-4114-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HST.2014.6855568

Filename

6855568