Multiple countermeasures on unrolled architecture PRINCE against power analysis and its evaluation

Abstract

Lightweight block ciphers, which can be implemented with low cost, are suitable for improving the safety of small devices. PRINCE is a typical lightweight block cipher and suitable for unrolled architecture implementation. In addition, PRINCE can be achieved low latency and embedded in a small area. However, it has been reported that PRINCE with unrolled architecture implementation is vulnerable to power analysis. Regarding countermeasure against power analysis, the threshold implementation and rotating S‐boxes masking are popular countermeasures, these require large implementation overhead though. Therefore, this study proposes a low‐overhead power analysis countermeasure method for PRINCE with unrolled architecture. Moreover, evaluation experiments using a field‐programmable gate array verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. In experiments, the proposed method improved tamper resistance and reduced implementation overhead in comparison with the conventional method.