A Template Attack-Resistant Masking Scheme for RC4 Based on FPGA

This paper introduces RC4 stream cipher which is widely used in the TLS/SSL protocol and several weaknesses in its algorithm. In order to enhance the security of RC4, this paper proposes a new masking scheme using random number for both input key and the internal states of RC4. This improved RC4 has destroyed the foundation of many attacks on RC4, especially the template attack. The new algorithm is realized based on the SAKURA-G FPGA board, and 1000 power traces and 5000 power traces are acquired from the unmasked and masked RC4 hardware respectively with 256 different input keys. The experiment results show that the proposed masking scheme for RC4 can be effectively resistant to template attack.