A Countermeasure for DES with Both Rotating Masks and Secured S-Boxes

As is known, masking and hiding are two quite effective ways to perform protection against the side channel attacks. However, since recent years the effectiveness of side channel attack has been highly improved, the traditional way of masking has been invalidated, especially when it comes to High-Order DPA attacks, which presents a real practical threat according to the recent results. In this article, we present a countermeasure for DES with Rotating Masks and Secured S-boxes and we have implemented it in hardware. A mixed protection scheme is introduced. We use a method of rotating the masks after each computing round to protect the linear parts of the DES algorithm, while using a hiding technique to protect the non-linear part such as the S-boxes. In this way we are able to perform an intermedia level of protection between First-Order DPA and Second-Order DPA, meanwhile keeping the circuit being less area consuming compared with other masking schemes.