Power Side-channel Attack Resistant Circuit Designs of ARX Ciphers Using High-level Synthesis

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, edge devices have been considerably diversified and are often designed using high-level synthesis (HLS) for improved design productivity. However, HLS tools were originally developed in a security-unaware manner, resulting in vulnerabilities to power side-channel attacks (PSCAs), which are a serious threat to IoT systems. Currently, the impact and applicability of existing methods to PSCA-resistant designs using HLS are limited. In this article, we propose an effective HLS-based design method for PSCA-resistant ciphers implemented in hardware. In particular, we focus on lightweight block ciphers composed of addition/rotation/XOR (ARX)-based permutations to study the effects of the threshold implementation (which is one of the provably secure countermeasures against PSCAs) to the behavioral descriptions of ciphers along with the changes in HLS scheduling. The results obtained using Welch’s t-test demonstrate that our proposed method can successfully improve the resistance against PSCAs for all ARX-based ciphers used as benchmarks.