Automated Verification of Correctness for Masked Arithmetic Programs

Masking is a widely-used effective countermeasure against power side-channel attacks for implementing cryptographic algorithms. Surprisingly, few formal verification techniques have addressed a fundamental question, i.e., whether the masked program and the original (unmasked) cryptographic algorithm are functional equivalent. In this paper, we study this problem for masked arithmetic programs over Galois fields of characteristic 2. We propose an automated approach based on term rewriting, aided by random testing and SMT solving. The overall approach is sound, and complete under certain conditions which do meet in practice. We implement the approach as a new tool FISCHER and carry out extensive experiments on various benchmarks. The results confirm the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of our approach. Almost all the benchmarks can be proved for the first time by the term rewriting system solely. In particular, FISCHER detects a new flaw in a masked implementation published in EUROCRYPT 2017.