Towards fair evaluation and intellectual property protection of cryptographic implementations

Abstract

With the emergence of the internet of things, the research surrounding the design of cryptographic algorithms suited for constrained environments has rapidly gained ground. This fast development of new security primitives and their implementation on electronic devices has led to several concerns in terms of fair evaluation, physical security and protection of their intellectual property (IP). These can be summarized with the following questions: 1. How can we fairly compare the performances of algorithms? How do lightweight algorithms compare to the standard ones? What is the impact of design choices on the implementation results? 2. To what extent do countermeasures against side-channel attacks (SCA) improve security and at which cost? What is the impact of new technologies on the physical security and efficiency of cryptographic implementations? 3. How to protect IPs in a way that is both flexible and secure? To answer these questions, we first propose different evaluation frameworks which allow us to compare the efficiency of cryptographic algorithms. From the obtained results, we extract some general design guidelines and show that normalized metrics (such as energy) are generally more illustrative. We then come up with more efficient implementations of the shuffling countermeasure which is an important solution to improve security against SCA. We also present the first implementation of the randomized look up table countermeasure. Finally, we propose a new flexible IP protection infrastructure exploiting the implementation power consumption as a signature.(FSA - Sciences de l) -- UCL, 201