Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/048

Power Balanced Circuits for Leakage-Power-Attacks Resilient Design

Basel Halak, Julian Murphy, Alex Yakovlev

Abstract: The continuous rise of static power consumption in modern CMOS technologies has led to the creation of a novel class of security attacks on cryptographic systems. The latter exploits the correlation between leakage current and the input patterns to infer the secret key; it is called leakage power analysis (LPA). The use power-balanced (m-of-n) logic is a promising solution that provides an answer to this problem, such circuits are designed to consume constant amount of power regardless of data being processed. This work evaluates the security of cryptographic circuits designed with this technology against the newly developed LPA. Two forms of LPA are investigated, one is based on differential power analysis (LDPA) and the other based on Hamming weight analysis (LHPA). Simulations performed at 90nm CMOS technology reveal that (m-of-n) circuits are totally resilient to LHPA and have a higher security level against LDPA than standard logic circuits.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / cryptanalysis

Publication Info: This work has not been published

Date: received 30 Jan 2013

Contact author: bh9 at ecs soton ac uk

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20130201:020817 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/048

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