Secure and dependable: Area-efficient masked and fault-tolerant architectures

Masking is a powerful instrument for protecting cryptographic devices against side-channel analysis. Multiple masking schemes were introduced providing provable security against attacks of arbitrary order even in the presence of glitches. When a device is a part of some safety-critical system, it needs to meet dependability requirements; therefore, it should be protected against spontaneously occurring faults. Existing commonly used fault-tolerance architectures involve high area overhead as so as the masking schemes do. In this paper, we propose architectures meeting dependability properties of simple modular-redundancy schemes and SCA resistance of masking schemes, but decreasing the area overhead utilizing the randomness involved in the masking schemes.We compare our Masked Duplex architecture with Triple Modular Redundancy. While using one less redundant module, our architecture saves around 20% of the area in comparison with TMR in the case of Threshold Implementation of PRESENT cipher, promising more savings for more complex cryptographic schemes.