MaskedHLS: Domain-Specific High-Level Synthesis of Masked Cryptographic Designs

TL;DR

MaskedHLS is a domain-specific high-level synthesis tool that automatically generates secure, glitch-robust masked cryptographic hardware with reduced latency and register count, ensuring power side-channel attack resistance.

Contribution

It introduces a specialized HLS approach that guarantees PSCA security, places registers strategically, and balances paths automatically, improving security and efficiency over manual methods.

Findings

73.9% reduction in register count

45.7% decrease in latency

Confirmed PSCA security with TVLA test

Abstract

The design and synthesis of masked cryptographic hardware implementations that are secure against power side-channel attacks (PSCAs) in the presence of glitches is a challenging task. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is a promising technique for generating masked hardware directly from masked software, offering opportunities for design space exploration. However, conventional HLS tools make modifications that alter the guarantee against PSCA security via masking, resulting in an insecure RTL. Moreover, existing HLS tools can't place registers at designated places and balance parallel paths in a cryptographic design which is needed to stop glitch propagation. This paper introduces a domain-specific HLS approach tailored to obtain a PSCA secure masked hardware implementation directly from a masked software implementation. It places the registers at specific locations required by the glitch-robust masking gadgets, resulting in a secure RTL. Moreover, our tool automatically balances parallel paths and facilitates a reduction in latency while preserving the PSCA security guaranteed by masking. Experimental results with the PRESENT Cipher's S-box and AES Canright's S-box masked with four state-of-the-art gadgets, show that MaskedHLS produces RTLs with 73.9% decrease in registers and 45.7% decrease in latency on an average} compared to manual register insertions. The PSCA security of the MaskedHLS generated RTLs is also shown with TVLA test.