Hardware Implementation and Side-Channel Analysis of Lapin

Lapin is a new authentication protocol that has been designed for low-cost implementations. In a work from RFIDsec 2012, Berstein and Lange argued that at similar (mathematical) security levels, Lapin's performances are below the ones of block cipher based authentication. In this paper, we suggest that as soon as physical security (e.g. against side-channel attacks) is taken into account, this criticism can be mitigated. For this purpose, we start by investigating masked hardware implementations of Lapin, and discuss the gains obtained over software ones. Next, we observe that the structure of our implementations significantly differs from block cipher ones (for which most results in side-channel analysis apply), hence raising questions regarding how to evaluate physical security in this case. We then provide first results of side-channel analyzes against unprotected and masked Lapin. Despite interesting properties of the masked implementations, our conclusions are still contrasted because of the on-chip randomness requirements of Lapin protocol. These results give strong incentive to design similar but deterministic protocols, e.g. based on the recently introduced Learning With Rounding assumption