DPA resistance for light-weight implementations of cryptographic algorithms on FPGAs

Abstract

Recent advances in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology are bound to make FPGAs a popular platform for battery powered devices. Many applications of such devices are mission critical and require the use of cryptographic algorithms to provide the desired security. However, Differential Power Analysis (DPA) attacks pose a sever threat against otherwise secure cryptographic implementations. Current techniques to defend against DPA attacks such as Dynamic Differential Logic (DDL) lead to an increase in area consumption of factor five or more. In this paper we show that moderate security against DPA attacks can be achieved for FPGAs using DDL resulting in an area increase of not much more than a factor two over standard FPGA implementations. Our design flow requires only FPGA design tools and some scripts.