Shortest Path to Secured Hardware: Domain Oriented Masking with High-Level-Synthesis

Implementing hardware secure against side-channel attacks (SCA) demands significant time and expertise in hardware design. In this paper, we propose a simple and fast approach for synthesizing masked block cipher hardware from a C-code exploiting High-Level-Synthesis (HLS), which allows a very short design time. Compared to previous approaches, our proposal provides a systematic and general flow based on state-of-the-art Domain-Oriented Masking (DOM). We also present a fast security-validation flow for the synthesized circuits at the early design stages using commercial-off-the-shelf CAD tools. Efficacy of the proposed design-flow has been established over a set of representative benchmarks including a masked S-Box and a lightweight block-cipher.