Paper 2026/343

PaCMan - Partition-Code Masking for Combined Security

Jakob Feldtkeller, PQShield

Tim Güneysu, Ruhr University Bochum, German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence

Elisabeth Krahmer, Ruhr University Bochum

Jan Richter-Brockmann, Ruhr University Bochum

Pascal Sasdrich, Ruhr University Bochum

Abstract

Physical attacks are a well-known threat for otherwise secure implementations of cryptographic algorithms. Although attacks and countermeasures for Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) and Fault-Injection Analysis (FIA) are well studied and individually understood, their combined exploitation and the corresponding countermeasures remain a relatively new area of research. Just recently, Feldtkeller et al. presented Combined Private Circuit (CPC) gadgets at CCS 2022 and CCS 2023 which were the first provably secure combined hardware gadgets that adhere to the notion of Combined-Isolating Non-Interference (CINI). The definition of the CINI notion has been a milestone for the development and formal verification of combined secure gadgets. However, it is also specifically tailored to the realization of side-channel resistance via plain masking and redundancy via replication, without further considerations of other constructions, e.g., those based on coding theory. In this work, we extend the existing definition of CINI to the notion of generalized Combined Isolated Non-Interfering (gCINI). Our generalizations allow to capture a much wider range of possible encodings, including - but not limited to - Boolean masking and replication, and provide a formal basis for the analysis of more general gadget constructions. We formally prove the combined security and composability of our new gCINI definition and give an explicit way to build such gadgets. The significance of our proposed construction is demonstrated through the implementation of several use cases, including an AES S-box design that outperforms comparable CPC-based approaches while maintaining the same level of combined security. Finally, we formally verify the security of our gadget constructions using an adapted version of VERICA.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/343,
      author = {Fabian Buschkowski and Jakob Feldtkeller and Tim Güneysu and Elisabeth Krahmer and Jan Richter-Brockmann and Pascal Sasdrich},
      title = {{PaCMan} - Partition-Code Masking for Combined Security},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/343},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/343}
}