Uniformly-Switching Logic for Cryptographic Hardware

Igor L. Markov (1) , Dmitri Maslov (2)

1 EECS - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
2 Department of Computer Science [Victoria]

Recent work on Differential Power Analysis shows that even mathematically-secure cryptographic protocols may be vulnerable at the physical implementation level. By measuring energy consumed by a working digital circuit, one can glean enough information to break encryption. Thwarting such attacks requires a new approach to logic and physical design. In this work, we seek to equalize switching activity of a circuit over all possible inputs and input transitions by adding redundant gates and increasing the overall number of signal transitions. We introduce uniformly-switching (U-S) logic, and present a doubling construction that equalizes power dissipation without requiring drastic changes in CAD tools.

Domaines: Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]; Electronique

Igor L. Markov, Dmitri Maslov. Uniformly-Switching Logic for Cryptographic Hardware. DATE'05, Mar 2005, Munich, Germany. pp.432-433. ⟨hal-00181551⟩