Another Evidence to not Employ Customized Masked Hardware

Abstract

As a well-studied countermeasure against side-channel analysis attacks, there is a general interest in applying masking to different cryptographic functions executed on different platforms. On the one hand, despite their high performance, masked hardware implementations are dedicated to specific algorithms, making them inflexible. On the other hand, applying masking on software involves serious challenges including significant overhead in terms of efficiency and difficulties to maintain theoretical security guarantees in practice. As a result, a line of research has been devoted to enable masked operations in flexible platforms (i.e., microprocessors) by including some masked modules in their hardware, hence a combination of flexibility and performance. In such scenarios, RISC-V is a natural choice as hardware can be adjusted to the extended instruction set. One such attempt presented at CHES 2021 is known as SCARV, which extends the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of a RISC-V core with a rich number of first-order masked operations on both Boolean and arithmetic masked operands. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of SCARV. Instead of relying on empirical measurements to demonstrate security, we utilize tool-assisted evaluations. Through these evaluations, we identified a couple of design flaws that lead to leakage in the masked implementations hosted by the corresponding processor. These flaws are primarily due to the lack of composability of cascaded components. While heuristic and ad-hoc design principles can result in secure, small, and efficient designs, they lack formal security proofs, which may lead to security flaws, like those we report here. Consequently, this work serves as a motivation for using composable masked modules and tool-assisted evaluations when constructing complex circuits.

Keywords

• Masking
• Hardware/Software co-design
• RISC-V
• SCARV