Side channel analysis of SPARX-64/128: Cryptanalysis and countermeasures

SPARX family of lightweight block cipher was introduced in Asiacrypt 2016. The family consists of three variants (a) SPARX-64/128, (b) SPARX-128/128 and (c) SPARX-128/256. In this work, first, we propose a technique to perform Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) on the SPARX-64/128 cipher. Our technique uses a combination of first-order, second-order and modulo addition CPA methods. Using our proposed technique we extract 128 key bits of SPARX-64/128 cipher with low complexities in general; key guess complexity of 212
and 65000≈216
power traces. We initially propose a countermeasure of SPARX-64/128 block cipher against side-channel attacks in terms of power analysis, a threshold implementation based on a serialized design of SPARX-64/128 core. The serialized design of SPARX-64/128 core is implemented in hardware and occupies 60 slices in FPGA. As a countermeasure, this serialized implementation is extended to propose a provably secure threshold implementation of SPARX-64/128 core (TI-SPARX). The TI-SPARX core occupies 131 slices in FPGA and runs at 144 MHz thus, giving a throughput of 9 Mbps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first side channel attack and countermeasure result on SPARX-64/128 cipher.