# The resistance of an FPGA implementation of Grasshopper block cipher to CPA attacks

## TL;DR

This paper implements the Grasshopper block cipher on FPGA, compares its resistance to CPA attacks with AES-256, and demonstrates that Grasshopper is more resistant to such side-channel attacks.

## Contribution

It introduces a FPGA implementation of Grasshopper with a novel software countermeasure against CPA attacks, and compares its security performance to AES-256.

## Key findings

- Grasshopper implementation resists CPA attacks that typically succeed on AES
- The proposed countermeasure enhances FPGA security against side-channel attacks
- Grasshopper shows higher resistance to correlation power analysis than AES-256

## Abstract

In this paper, we implement the Russian standard block cipher Grasshopper on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). We also study the Correlation Power Analysis attack, which is a special type of side-channel attack proposed by Brier et al. To face this kind of attack, we propose a solution of software countermeasure, and we present the associated implementation of the Grasshopper algorithm. These two implementations are then compared to an AES-256 one. Finally, through the implementation of a CPA attack on an FPGA development board, we show that typical attack models that work on AES fail on Grasshopper implementations.