Masking Based Protection Mechanism for Ascon against CPA Attack

Ascon was selected as the standard of lightweight cryptographic algorithm by NIST in 2023, and it is expected that Ascon will be used in IoT devices in the future. Still, the vulnerability of the Ascon circuit against side-channel attacks (SCAs) remains an issue. A threshold implementation has been proposed, but the hardware cost is non-trivial. In this paper, we propose a masking-based protection mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively prevent correlation power analysis (CPA) with low hardware overhead.