Presented at CHES 2022 conference
RAMBAM:
A New Very Compact and Efficient Protection of AES against SC and FI attacks
This is an academic paper describing a protection method for AES which is very efficient, and configurable for any application. It introduces RAMBAM, an innovative algebraic masking technique designed to protect against side-channel attacks and SIFA1.
Utilizing redundant representations in the Galois field and re-randomization, RAMBAM maintains uniform distribution of the masked state. Its flexibility, driven by the security parameter (d), allows for various configurations. Experimental results show that leakage decreases exponentially with increased redundancy, achieving no observable leakage with (d = 8) in extensive tests. RAMBAM offers lower latency compared to previous solutions, and ensures robustness against SIFA-1 attacks targeting up to 4 bits in the internal state register.
FortifyIQ presents an analytical model that explains how the scheme reduces the leakage and how the design choices affect it. Furthermore, FortifyIQ demonstrates experimentally how different design choices achieve the required goals. In particular, the compact version exhibits a gate count as low as 12.075 kGE, while maintaining adequate protection. The performance-oriented version provides latency as low as one round per cycle, thus combining protection against SCA and SIFA-1 with high performance.
