Sniff-SAR: A 9.8fJ/c.-s 12b secure ADC with detectiondriven protection against power and EM side-channel attack

Abstract

As shown in Fig. 1, sensitive and confidential information can be stolen from an ADC by Electro-magnetic side-channel attacks (EMSA) or power side-channel attacks (PSA). An EM probe can measure the EM side-channel information of the ADC [1], [2]. An attacker can obtain the power side-channel information by measuring the power traces of the ADC [3], [4]. There are two challenges for secure ADCs. First, to address the security concerns, secure ADCs have non-negligible overheads in energy and area, which is not ideal for resource constrained 1oT applications. The protection scheme is typically always-on even if the side-channel attacks are not performed. Second, neural network-based sidechannel attacks are becoming more powerful, making existing protection less robust. To address these two challenges, this work proposes the first detection-driven secure ADC against both power and EM side-channel attacks. The ADC normally operates in an energy efficient switching mode. When an EMSA or PSA is detected, secure switching is enabled that renders the ADC very difficult by neural network based attacks.