Revisiting the built-in resistance of 8-bit S-Boxes against Correlation Power Analysis in the Hamming weight power model

Resumen

The design of substitution boxes having built-in resistance against side-channel attacks is an active field of
research. In the course of the last ten years several theoretical properties of substitution boxes to measure
this resistance have been enunciated being the confusion coefficient variance one of the most relevant. The
majority of the substitution boxes generated under the confusion coefficient variance criteria shows, indeed,
a certain level of resistance against a correlation power analysis, however they are conceived only for the
encryption process while its inverse, which is used for decryption, is often not taken into account. This may
result in a vulnerability of the algorithm during the decryption process. In this paper we conduct an analysis of
the built-in resistance of 8-bit substitution boxes and their inverses in a side-channel scenario using the state
of the art results in this topic. Moreover, we introduce a new method for generating high nonlinear substitution
boxes having theoretical built-in resistance against correlation power analysis as well as their inverses.