Measurement and Evaluation of Power Analysis Attacks on Asynchronous S-Box

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the hardware implementation of a recently proposed low-power asynchronous Advanced Encryption Standard substitution box (S-Box) design that is capable of being resistant to side channel attack (SCA). A specified SCA standard evaluation field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board (SASEBO-GII) is used to implement both synchronous and asynchronous S-Box designs. This asynchronous S-Box is based on self-time logic referred to as null convention logic (NCL), which supports a few beneficial properties for resisting SCAs: clock free, dual-rail encoding, and monotonic transitions. These beneficial properties make it difficult for an attacker to decipher secret keys embedded within the cryptographic circuit of the FPGA board. Comparisons on the resistance to SCAs of both the original and proposed S-Box design are presented, using differential power analysis (DPA) and correlation power analysis (CPA) attacks. The power measurement results showed that the NCL S-Box had 22%-26% lower total power consumption than the original and was effective against DPA and CPA attacks. An important factor of successfully implementing DPA or CPA attacks, which is the number of power traces, is also analyzed in this paper.