A Lightweight Power Side-Channel Attack Protection Technique With Minimized Overheads Using On-Demand Current Equalizer
Journal
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs
Journal Volume
69
Journal Issue
10
Pages
4008
Date Issued
2022-10-01
Author(s)
Abstract
A lightweight on-demand current equalizer is proposed in this brief to enhance the resistance of the encryption engine to power side-channel attack (PSCA) with a minimized performance-power-area (PPA) overhead. The proposed on-demand current equalizer is operated based on the real-time activity of the encryption engine to minimize the corresponding current signature leakage, while enhancing the supply quality by reducing the voltage droop. Therefore, an encryption engine employing the proposed PSCA protection technique has a low power overhead without suffering from any performance degradation. In addition, an embedded randomization method is proposed to further strengthen the resistance of the encryption engine to PSCA while maintaining the power supply quality. A prototype chip that integrates the proposed design, a 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES) engine, and a digital low-dropout voltage regulator (DLDO) was fabricated in 180-nm CMOS technology. Measurement results show that the proposed design achieves 234{times } minimum traces to disclose (MTD) improvements in correlation power analysis (CPA), with no performance overhead, 21.17% power overhead, and 32.88% area overhead, respectively.
Subjects
Advanced encryption standard (AES) | correlation power analysis (CPA) | integrated voltage regulator (IVR) | power side-channel attack (PSCA)
SDGs
Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
Type
journal article