An Analysis of Leakage Factors for Dual-Rail Pre-Charge Logic Style

Abstract

In recent years, certain countermeasures against differential power analysis (DPA) at the logic level have been proposed. Recently, Popp and Mangard proposed a new countermeasure-masked dual-rail pre-charge logic (MDPL); this countermeasure combines dual-rail circuits with random masking to improve the wave dynamic differential logic (WDDL). They claimed that it could implement secure circuits using a standard CMOS cell library without special constraints for the place-and-route method because the difference between the loading capacitances of all the pairs of complementary logic gates in MDPL can be compensated for by the random masking. In this paper, we particularly focus on the signal transition of MDPL gates and evaluate the DPA-resistance of MDPL in detail. Our evaluation results reveal that when the input signals have different delay times, leakage occurs in the MDPL as well as WDDL gates, even if MDPL is effective in reducing the leakage caused by the difference in loading capacitances. Furthermore, in order to validate our evaluation, we demonstrate a problem with different input signal delays by conducting measurements for an FPGA.