Provably Secure Higher-Order Masking of AES

Implementations of cryptographic algorithms are vulnerable to Side Channel Analysis (SCA). To counteract it, masking schemes are usually involved which randomize key-dependent data by the addition of one or several random value(s) (the masks). When dth-order masking is involved (i.e. when d masks are used per key-dependent variable), the complexity of performing an SCA grows exponentially with the order d. The design of generic dth-order masking schemes taking the order d as security parameter is therefore of great interest for the physical security of cryptographic implementations. This paper presents the first generic dth-order masking scheme for AES with a provable security and a reasonable software implementation overhead. Our scheme is based on the hardware-oriented masking scheme published by Ishai et al. at Crypto 2003. Compared to this scheme, our solution can be efficiently implemented in software on any general-purpose processor. This result is of importance considering the lack of solution for d > 3.