Covert and Secure Underwater Acoustic Communication using Merkle Hash Tree and Dolphin Whistle

Differential Power Analysis (DPA) implies measuring the supply current of a cipher-circuit in an attempt to uncover part of a cipher key. Cryptographic security gets compromised if the current waveforms obtained correlate with those from a hypothetical power model of the circuit. In recent years, the security of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) against DPA, has received considerable attention. This paper presents a practical implementation of advanced encryption standard (AES-128) algorithm combined with a simple yet effective masking scheme to protect it against differential and correlation power analysis attacks. The proposed masking scheme has advantages of easy software implementation and lower memory requirement compared to conventional first-order masking technique. In addition, it is robust against both first and second-order differential power analysis. The experimental results and also the results of Welch’s T-Test statistical analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme has less information leakage than other existing conventional first-order masking schemes.