Power Leakage Detection for a Masked SM3-MAC Hardware Implementation

The SM3-MAC algorithm is a Message Authentication Code (MAC) algorithm based on the SM3 hash algorithm proposed by Office of Security Commercial Code Administration in 2010. In this paper, a masking scheme for SM3-MAC algorithm using key mask is proposed. Then, 5,000 power traces are collected by software simulation with Hamming distance model. We can prove that the unmasked SM3-MAC hardware is vulnerable to first-order power analysis, while the masked SM3-MAC hardware does not have register leakage under the Hamming distance model. After that, the SAKURA-G FPGA board is used to collect two sets of power traces of the masked SM3-MAC hardware, each of which contains 3,000 traces. The Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA) methodology proves that there is a 99.999% chance that no first-order power leakage is detected in the masked SM3-MAC hardware. Finally, the feasibility of second-order power analysis is discussed, and the effects of different pre-processing functions on correlation are investigated. A second-order test has been carried out to analyze the second-order security of the masked SM3-MAC hardware, which proves that there exists second-order leakage.