Analysis of masking effects on DPA countermeasure for lightweight cryptographic algorithms

Abstract

As the market of Internet of Thing (IoT) exponentially grows, lightweight cryptographic algorithms have become necessary and important. Lightweight Encryption Algorithm (LEA) was recently developed for lightweight and low power consumption. LEA requires countermeasure techniques against differential power analysis (DPA) attacks that are known to be one of the most effective side channel attacks. In this paper, we implemented the mask structure of LEA as hardware and compared LEA and HIGHT which is the one of lightweight cryptographic in order to find how effective the result of its implementation. We compare masking effects on HIGHT module and our module. The analysis result showed that LEA module with masking technique maintains throughput like a HIGHT and the rate of increase in the area of the LEA is smaller than HIGHT.