DPA Protected Implementation of OCB and COLM Authenticated Ciphers

Authenticated ciphers are designed to provide two security requirements simultaneously, i.e. confidentiality and integrity. The CAESAR competition was ended with introducing six authenticated ciphers for several applications as the winners. The OCB and COLM authenticated ciphers are two AES-based winners, respectively for high-speed and defense in-depth applications. Similar to the implementation of any other cryptographic algorithm, unprotected implementations of these ciphers could also be vulnerable to side-channel attacks, especially differential power analysis (DPA). In this work, first, the OCB and COLM ciphers are implemented on FPGA of SAKURA-G board. Then their vulnerability is shown with power leakage detection using t-test over the power traces. Also, the first-order protected version of these ciphers is presented using two masking scheme, i.e. threshold implementation (TI) and domain-oriented masking (DOM). To verify these countermeasures, the first and second-order t-test is conducted, to indicate the resistance of protected schemes to the first-order DPA attacks. Finally, the hardware implementation of two protected and unprotected versions of ciphers on FPGA are benchmarked based on the criteria of area, maximum frequency, and throughput. Additionally, the ratio of the increased area and decreased throughput to the unprotected ciphers have been compared with previous works.