A Hardware-based Countermeasure to Reduce Side-Channel Leakage - Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

An­dre­as Gor­nik; Amir Mo­ra­di; Jür­gen Oehm; Chris­tof Paar

Paper 2015/348

A Hardware-based Countermeasure to Reduce Side-Channel Leakage - Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

Andreas Gornik, Amir Moradi, Jürgen Oehm, and Christof Paar

Abstract

Side-channel attacks are one of the major concerns for security-enabled applications as they make use of information leaked by the physical implementation of the underlying cryptographic algorithm. Hence, reducing the side-channel leakage of the circuits realizing the cryptographic primitives is amongst the main goals of circuit designers. In this work we present a novel circuit concept, which decouples the main power supply from an internal power supply that is used to drive a single logic gate. The decoupling is done with the help of buffering capacitances integrated into semiconductor. We also introduce – compared to the previously known schemes – an improved decoupling circuit which reduces the crosstalk from the internal to the external power supply. The result of practical side-channel evaluation on a prototype chip fabricated in a 150nm CMOS technology shows a high potential of our proposed technique to reduce the side-channel leakages.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Published elsewhere. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
DOI: 10.1109/TCAD.2015.2423274
Keywords: side-channel analysis side-channel countermeasure circuit-level countermeasure ASIC hardware-based countermeasure
Contact author(s): amir moradi @ rub de
History: 2015-04-25: revised; 2015-04-23: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2015/348
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/348,
      author = {Andreas Gornik and Amir Moradi and Jürgen Oehm and Christof Paar},
      title = {A Hardware-based Countermeasure to Reduce Side-Channel Leakage - Design, Implementation, and Evaluation},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/348},
      year = {2015},
      doi = {10.1109/TCAD.2015.2423274},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/348}
}