UpWB: An Uncoupled Architecture Design for White-box Cryptography Using Vectorized Montgomery Multiplication

Abstract

White-box cryptography (WBC) seeks to protect secret keys even if the attacker has full control over the execution environment. One of the techniques to hide the key is space hardness approach, which conceals the key into a large lookup table generated from a reliable small block cipher. Despite its provable security, space-hard WBC also suffers from heavy performance overhead when executed on general purpose hardware platform, hundreds of magnitude slower than conventional block ciphers. Specifically, recent studies adopt nested substitution permutation network (NSPN) to construct dedicated white-box block cipher [BIT16], whose performance is limited by a massive number of rounds, nested loop dependency and high-dimension dynamic maximal distance separable (MDS) matrices.
To address these limitations, we put forward UpWB, an uncoupled and efficient accelerator for NSPN-structure WBC. We propose holistic optimization techniques across timing schedule, algorithms and operators. For the high-level timing schedule, we propose a fine-grained task partition (FTP) mechanism to decouple the parameteroriented nested loop with different trip counts. The FTP mechanism narrows down the idle time for synchronization and avoids the extra usage of FIFO, which efficiently increases the computation throughput. For the optimization of arithmetic operators, we devise a flexible and vectorized modular multiplier (VMM) based on the complexity-reduced Montgomery algorithm, which can process multi-precision variable data, multi-size matrix-vector multiplication and different irreducible polynomials. Then, a configurable matrix-vector multiplication (MVM) architecture with diagonal-major dataflow is presented to handle the dynamic MDS matrix. The multi-scale (Inv)Mixcolumns are also unified in a compact manner by intensively sharing the common sub-operations and customizing the constant multiplier.
To verify the proposed methodology, we showcase the unified design implementation for three recent families of WBCs, including SPNbox-8/16/24/32, Yoroi-16/32 and WARX-16. Evaluated on FPGA platform, UpWB outperforms the optimized software counterpart (executed on 3.2 GHz Intel CPU with AES-NI and AVX2 instructions) by 7x to 30x in terms of computation throughput. Synthesized under TSMC 28nm technology, 36x to 164x improvement of computation throughput is achieved when UpWB operates at the maximum frequency of 1.3 GHz and consumes a modest area 0.14 mm². Besides, the proposed VMM also offers about 30% improvement of area efficiency without pulling flexibility down when compared to state-of-the-art work.