Abstract
The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices necessitates lightweight cryptographic algorithms and their secure physical implementations. Masking, as a provably secure countermeasure against side-channel attacks (SCA), has been extensively studied in the context of lightweight cryptography algorithms. Currently, Jiao et al. have proposed a low-cost threshold implementation (TI) of the uBlock algorithm. However, their approach suffers from significant area overhead due to the inefficient serial and pipelined implementation of uBlock’s Pshufb-Xor (PX) network structure. To address this issue, we have developed a new serial and pipelined implementation method that optimizes the area of the uBlock algorithm. Based on this optimization, we implemented a 2-share TI scheme for uBlock that requires minimal area resources and does not need fresh randomness. Compared to the work by Jiao et al., our approach reduces slice area by 63.4% on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) platform and GE area by 17.2% on Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) platform for the unprotected implementation. For the protected implementation, our approach reduces slice area by 41.5% and GE area by 14.0%. Finally, our protection scheme was validated using the automated tool PROLEAD and evaluated with Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA), achieving first-order glitch-extended probing security.