The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is widely recognized as a robust cryptographic algorithm utilized to protect data integrity and confidentiality. When it comes to lightweight implementations of the algorithm, the literature mainly emphasizes area and power optimization, often overlooking considerations related to performance and security. This paper evaluates two of our previously proposed lightweight AES implementations using both profiled and non-profiled attacks. One is an unprotected implementation, and the other one is a protected version using Domain-Oriented Masking (DOM). The findings of this study indicate that the inclusion of DOM in the design enhances its resistance to attacks at the cost of doubling the area.

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is generally regarded as one of the most popular cryptographic algorithms for ensuring data security. Typical lightweight implementations of the algorithm published in the literature focus on area and power optimization, while neglecting the performance. This paper presents a novel lightweight approach for the AES algorithm and considers both encryption and decryption. In terms of performance per unit area and performance per unit power, our 32-bit design outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.69x and 1.27x, respectively. These improvements become even larger when implementing higher data-path designs, such as 64-bit or 128-bit designs. To enhance its resilience against side-channel attacks, we modified our design by adopting and further improving on the most recent countermeasure, i.e., Domain-Oriented Masking (DOM). The results demonstrate that our five-stage and eight-stage 1st-order DOM SBOX designs achieve a reduction in area of 9.9% and 6.9% compared to the original proposed design, respectively.