CPA on COLM Authenticated Cipher and the Protection Using Domain-Oriented Masking

Authenticated encryption schemes are important cryptographic primitives that received extensive attention recently. They can provide both confidentiality and authenticity services, simultaneously. Correlation power analysis (CPA) can be a thread for authenticated ciphers, similar to the any physical implementation of any other cryptographic scheme. In this paper, a three-step CPA attack against COLM, one of the winners of CAESAR competition, is presented to indicate its vulnerability. To validate this attack, COLM is implemented on the FPGA of the SAKURA-G board. A successful CPA attack with zero value power model is mounted by measuring and collecting 1,800 power traces. In addition, a protected hardware architecture for COLM is proposed to make this design secure against first-order CPA attacks, where a domain-oriented masking (DOM) scheme with two-input/output shares is used to protect it. To verify these countermeasures, we mount first and second-order CPA attacks and a non-specified t-test on the protected COLM.