Paper 2020/317
Physical Time-Varying Transfer Functions as Generic Low-Overhead Power-SCA Countermeasure
Archisman Ghosh, Debayan Das, and Shreyas Sen
Abstract
Mathematically-secure cryptographic algorithms leak significant side-channel information through their power supplies when implemented on a physical platform. These side-channel leakages can be exploited by an attacker to extract the secret key of an embedded device. The existing state-of-the-art countermeasures mainly focus on the power balancing, gate-level masking, or signal-to-noise (SNR) reduction using noise injection and signature attenuation, all of which suffer either from the limitations of high power/area overheads, performance degradation or are not synthesizable. In this article, we propose a generic low-overhead digital-friendly power SCA countermeasure utilizing physical Time-Varying Transfer Functions (TVTF) by randomly shuffling distributed switched capacitors to significantly obfuscate the traces in the time domain. System-level simulation results of the TVTF-AES implemented in TSMC 65nm CMOS technology show > 4000x MTD improvement over the unprotected implementation with ~ 1.25x power and ~ 1.2x area overheads, and without any performance degradation.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Implementation
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- Power Side-Channel AttackLow-overhead CountermeasurePhysical ObfuscationTime-varying transfer functionSynthesizableGeneric.
- Contact author(s)
- ghosh69 @ purdue edu
- History
- 2020-03-15: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2020/317
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/317,
author = {Archisman Ghosh and Debayan Das and Shreyas Sen},
title = {Physical Time-Varying Transfer Functions as Generic Low-Overhead Power-SCA Countermeasure},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2020/317},
year = {2020},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/317}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/317}
}
