Galvanically Isolated, Power and Electromagnetic Side-Channel Attack Resilient Secure AES Core with Integrated Charge Pump based Power Management

Abstract

A galvanic isolation (GI) technique for cryptographic cores is proposed to mitigate power and electromagnetic (EM) sidechannel analysis (SCA) attacks. The design uses deep N-well technology and an integrated charge pump-based power delivery and management to completely isolate V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CC</sub> , V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SS</sub> , and substrate nodes from the external supply and ground pins, improving the SCA resilience due to supply as well as ground bounce. Measured results from a 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) core implemented in a 40nm CMOS show >600x and >t220x improvement against a correlation power analysis (CPA) and coarse-grained EM SCA attack, respectively, while operating at 20% lower frequency, consuming 2.3x more power, and occupying 0.0136 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> larger area.