A Lightweight Countermeasure of SM4 against Side Channel Analysis

This paper presents a lightweight countermeasure scheme of SM4 cryptographic algorithm against side channel analysis attacks. SM4 is one of the widely used block ciphers in information computing and data communication. However, as it is usually implemented in cryptographic devices, it is definitely under the threat of side channel analysis attacks. Some schemes of implementations have been provided as the countermeasures against the side channel analysis attacks, which leads to a relatively complicated realization on both cost and performance. This paper proposes a new mask scheme for SM4 implementation with lightweight cost and low performance loss. Experiment results show the effectiveness of the method against the side channel analysis attacks.