Side-channel attack-resistant AES S-box with hidden subfield inversion and glitch-free masking

Abstract

A side-channel attack (SCA)-resistant AES S-box implementation is proposed, which is an improvement from the power-aware hiding (PAH) S-box but with higher security and a smaller area. We use the composite field approach and apply the PAH method to the inversion in the nonlinear kernel and a masking method to the other parts. In addition, a delay-matched enable control technique is used to suppress glitches in the masked parts. The evaluation results show that its area is contracted to 63.3% of the full PAH S-box, and its power-delay product is much lower than that of the masking implementation. The leakage assessment using simulation power traces concludes that it has no detectable leakage under t-test and that it at least can thwart the moment-correlation analysis using 665 000 noiseless traces.