Implementation and efficiency evaluation of construction-based countermeasures against electromagnetic analysis

Abstract

Side Channel Analysis (SCA) is a powerful class of attacks to extract cryptographic keys used in a wide variety of electronic devices that involves authentication, digital signatures or secure storage. Cryptographic systems are made up of cryptographic primitives implemented in Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor technology. But CMOS logic gates are designed to minimize their energy usage when their output does not change. Energy is consumed or dissipated mainly for the transitions ‘0 to 1’ and ‘1 to 0’. Side channel information like power consumption, electromagnetic radiation or light emission, changes the conventional black box model of a cryptographic system into a gray one. By this way, its possible to extract a secret key in a couple of hours. Within this context, this paper introduces the basic concepts of some interesting CMOS logic families, from a security point-of-view, and a design of a cryptographic system based on Secure Triple Track Logic (STTL). This logic is efficient against Differential Power Analysis (DPA), and evaluated in this work against Differential Electro Magnetic Analysis (DEMA) based on Difference of Means (DoM) and Correlation Electro Magnetic Analysis (CEMA).