Energy-Efficient Side-Channel Attack Countermeasure With Awareness and Hybrid Configuration Based on It

Abstract

Energy-efficient countermeasures to side-channel attacks are required for Internet of Things hardware. This paper proposes a special hiding technique for the substitution operation in block ciphers, which equalizes the power consumption of a circuit by appropriate feedforward compensation and is called power-aware hiding (PAH). A hybrid application configuration, in which PAH is applied to the S-boxes while the left linear operations are protected with a general masking method, is proposed as well. This solution not only has higher energy efficiency but can also be implemented automatically in a semicustom manner. The Advanced Encryption Standard VLSI adopting this solution was implemented and manufactured in 180-nm technology as a demonstration. The implementation issues regarding the countermeasures are discussed in this paper. Testing shows that the chip has a throughput up to 1.175 Gb/s with 18.1-mW power consumption and its number of measurements to disclosure is 13.4 million.