1 research outputs found
Circuit Masking: From Theory to Standardization, A Comprehensive Survey for Hardware Security Researchers and Practitioners
Side-channel attacks extracting sensitive data from implementations have been
considered a major threat to the security of cryptographic schemes. This has
elevated the need for improved designs by embodying countermeasures, with
masking being the most prominent example. To formally verify the security of a
masking scheme, numerous attack models have been developed to capture the
physical properties of the information leakage as well as the capabilities of
the adversary. With regard to these models, extensive research has been
performed to realize masking schemes. These research efforts have led to
significant progress in the development of security assessment methodologies
and further initiated standardization activities. However, since the majority
of this work is theoretical, it is challenging for the more practice-oriented
hardware security community to fully grasp and contribute to. To bridge the
gap, these advancements are reviewed and discussed in this survey, mainly from
the perspective of hardware security. In doing so, a clear taxonomy is provided
that is helpful for a systematic treatment of the masking-related topics. By
giving an extensive overview of the existing methods, this survey (1) provides
a research landscape of circuit masking for newcomers to the field, (2) offers
guidelines on which attack model and verification tool to choose when designing
masking schemes, and (3) identifies interesting new research directions where
masking models and assessment tools can be applied. Thus, this survey serves as
an essential reference for hardware security practitioners interested in the
theory behind masking techniques, the tools useful to verify the security of
masked circuits, and their potential applications