Chosen-IV correlation power analysis on kcipher-2 hardware and a masking-based countermeasure

This paper presents a chosen-IV (Initial Vector) correlation power analysis on the international standard stream cipher KCipher-2 together with an effective countermeasure. First, we describe a power analysis technique which can reveal the secret key (initial key) of KCipher-2 and then evaluate the validity of the CPA with experiments using both FPGA and ASIC implementations of KCipher-2 processors. This paper also proposes a masking-based countermeasure against the CPA. The concept of the proposed countermeasure is to mask intermediate data which pass through the non-linear function part including integer addition, substitution functions, and internal registers L1 and L2. We design two types of masked integer adders and two types of masked substitution circuits in order to minimize circuit area and delay, respectively. The effectiveness of the countermeasure is demonstrated through an experiment on the same FPGA platform. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through the ASIC fabricated by TSMC 65 nm CMOS process technology. In comparison with the conventional design, the design with the countermeasure can be achieved by the area increase of 1.6 times at most.