Current Mask Generation: an Analog Circuit to Thwart DPA Attacks

Abstract

This work addresses the leakage information problem concerning cryptographic circuits. Physical implementations of cryptographic algorithms may let escape some side channel information, like electromagnetic emanations, temperature, computing time, and power consumption. With this information, an attacker can retrieve the data that is being computed, like cryptographic keys. This paper proposes a novel method to thwart DPA attacks, based on power consumption control. As main contribution, this approach not requires any modification on the cryptographic algorithm, the messages or keys.