Boolean Matrix Masking for SM4 Block Cipher Algorithm

SM4, a proposed commercial block cipher to be used in IEEE 802.11i standard, has been widely performed in the Chinese National Standard for Wireless LAN WAPI (Wired Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure). Although it provides mathematical security in theory, implementation of the algorithm can be vulnerable to some side-channel analysis, especially Differential Power Analysis (DPA). To counter this kind of attacks, various masking schemes and other countermeasures have been well developed. In this paper, we propose and implement a new masking scheme for SM4 to defend DPA-like attacks. This countermeasure is based on Boolean matrix product masking which is a provable security masking scheme and consists of both additive Boolean masking and inner product masking directions. We develop a first variant version of this full-masking scheme on SM4 and implement it particularly on ATMega2560 in pure C language. Though the security potential of this matrix masking scheme has been proved, we evaluate performance and efficiency of this masking scheme through experiments in the paper.