Higher-Order Masking in Practice: A Vector Implementation of Masked AES for ARM NEON

Real-world software implementations of cryptographic algorithms need to be able to resist various kinds of side-channel attacks, in particular Differential Power Analysis (DPA). Masking is a widely-used countermeasure to protect block ciphers like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) against DPA attacks. The basic principle is to split all sensitive intermediate variables manipulated by the algorithm into two shares and process these shares separately. However, this approach still succumbs to higher-order DPA attacks, which exploit the joint leakage of a number of intermediate variables. A viable solution is to generalize masking such that at least d+1 shares are used to protect against d-th order attacks. Unfortunately, all current higher-order masking schemes introduce a significant computational overhead compared to unmasked implementations. To facilitate the deployment of higher-order masking for the AES in practice, we developed a vector implementation of Coron et al's masking scheme (FSE 2012) for ARM NEON processors. After a comprehensive complexity analysis, we found that Coron et al's scheme with n shares for each sensitive variable needs O(n^2) multiplications in the field GF(2^8) and O(n^2) random-number generations. Both of these performance-critical operations are executed with only 15 instructions in our software, which is possible thanks to the rich functionality of the NEON instruction set. Our experimental results demonstrate that the performance penalty caused by the integration of higher-order masking is significantly lower than in generally assumed and reported in previous papers. For example, our second-order DPA-protected AES (with three shares for each sensitive variable) is merely eight times slower than an unmasked baseline implementation that resists cache-timing attacks.