PowerScout: A Security-Oriented Power Delivery Network Modeling Framework for Cross-Domain Side-Channel Analysis

Abstract

The growing complexity of modern electronic systems often leads to the design of more sophisticated power delivery networks (PDNs). Similar to other system-level shared resources, the on-board PDN unintentionally introduces side channels across design layers and voltage domains, despite the fact that PDNs are not part of the functional design. Recent work have demonstrated that exploitation of the side channel can compromise the system security (i.e. information leakage and fault injection). In this work, we systematically investigate the PDN-based side channel as well as the countermeasures. To facilitate our goal, we develop PowerScout, a security-oriented PDN simulation framework that unifies the modeling of different PDN-based side-channel attacks. PowerScout performs fast nodal analysis of complex PDNs at the system level to quantitatively evaluate the severity of side-channel vulnerabilities. With the support of PowerScout, for the first time, we validate PDN side-channel attacks in literature through simulation results. Further, we are able to quantitatively measure the security impact of PDN parameters and configurations. For example, towards information leakage, removing near-chip capacitors can increase intra-chip information leakage by a maximum of 23.23dB at mid-frequency and inter-chip leakage by an average of 31.68dB at mid- and high-frequencies. Similarly, the optimal toggling frequency and duty cycle are derived to achieve fault injection attacks with higher success rate and more precise control.