• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.46 no.11
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• pp.8-15
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• 2009

Side-channel attacks including the differential power analysis attack are often more powerful than classical cryptanalysis and have to be seriously considered by cryptographic algorithm's implementers. Various countermeasures have been proposed against such attacks. In this paper, we deal with the masking method, which is known to be a very effective countermeasure against the differential power analysis attack and propose new gate-level conversion methods between Boolean and arithmetic masks. The new methods require only 6n-5 XOR and 2n-2 AND gates with 3n-2 gate delay for converting n-bit masks. The basic idea of the proposed methods is that the carry and the sum bits in the ripple adder are manipulated in a way that the adversary cannot detect the relation between these bits and the original raw data. Since the proposed methods use only bitwise operations, they are especially useful for DPA-securely implementing cryptographic algorithms in hardware which use both Boolean and arithmetic operations. For example, we applied them to securely implement the block encryption algorithm SEED in hardware and present its detailed implementation result.