A Lightweight AES Implementation Against Bivariate First-Order DPA Attacks

Abstract

Aggressive voltage scaling (AVS) technique is an efficient and lightweight countermeasure for cryptographic circuits against conventional first-order (CFO) differential power analysis (DPA) attacks. However, in this paper, it is demonstrated that AVS technique is vulnerable against bivariate first-order (BFO) DPA attacks since the noise inserted by the random scaling of the voltage can be filtered easily under BFO DPA attacks. To protect a cryptographic circuit that utilizes voltage scaling against BFO attacks, a lightweight implementation of the advanced encryption standard (AES) is proposed. In the proposed technique, even if the noise inserted by the random voltage scaling is filtered, a significant amount of random power noise can still be present in the side-channel leakage obtained by BFO DPA attacks. As demonstrated with the simulation results, when BFO DPA attacks are implemented on the proposed lightweight random AES engine with AVS technique, the measurement-to-disclose (MTD) value is enhanced over 1 million. Alternatively, the MTD value is less than 6,000 under BFO DPA attacks for a conventional AES engine with AVS technique.