Security Evaluation of DPA Countermeasures Using Dual-Rail Pre-charge Logic Style

Abstract

In recent years, some countermeasures against Differential Power Analysis (DPA) at the logic level have been proposed. At CHES 2005 conference, Popp and Mangard proposed a new countermeasure named Masked Dual-Rail Pre-Charge Logic (MDPL) which combine dual-rail circuits with random masking to improve Wave Dynamic Differential Logic (WDDL). The proposers of MDPL claim that it can implement secure circuits using a standard CMOS cell library without special constraints for the place-and-route because the difference of loading capacitance between all pairs of complementary logic gates in MDPL can be covered up by the random masking. In this paper, we especially focus the signal transition of the MDPL gate and evaluate the DPA-resistance of MDPL in detail. Our evaluation results show that the leakage occurs in the MDPL gates as well as WDDL gates when input signals have difference of delay time even if MDPL has an effectiveness on reducing the leakage caused by the difference of loading capacitance. Furthermore, we demonstrate the problem with different input signal delays by measurements of an FPGA and show the validity of our evaluation.