Lightweight and DPA-Resistant Post-Quantum Cryptoprocessor based on Binary Ring-LWE

With the exponential growth in the internet of things (IoT) applications such as smart city and e-health, more embedded devices and smart nodes are connected to the network. In order to provide security for such resource-constrained devices, different cryptographic schemes such as public key encryption (PKE) are required. However, considering the high complexity and vulnerability of classic PKE schemes against quantum attacks, it is necessary to consider other possible options. Recently, lattice-based cryptography and especially learning with errors (LWE) have gained high attention due to resistance against quantum attacks and relatively low-complexity operations. During the past decade, some of the variants of Ring-LWE cryptosystem have been implemented efficiently on both hardware and software and are shown to be practical on different resource-constrained and embedded devices in IoT. Besides efficiency, every practical implementation of any cryptosystem must also be analyzed against side-channel attacks. In this paper, we propose masking countermeasure against differential power analysis (DPA) attack on lightweight implementations of binary Ring-LWE on hardware. Our experimental results indicate that proposed DPA-secure implementations have lower than 14% performance overhead and are still practical on resource-constrained devices. Moreover, the FPGA implementation results indicate more than 99% and 81% improvement for speed and efficiency, respectively compared to previous work.