Successful Attack on an FPGA-based WDDL DES Cryptoprocessor Without Place and Route Constraints.

Laurent Sauvage (1) , Sylvain Guilley (1) , Jean-Luc Danger (1) , Yves Mathieu (1) , Maxime Nassar (1)

1 LTCI - Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l'Information

In this paper, we propose a preprocessing method to improve Side Channel Attacks (SCAs) on Dual-rail with Precharge Logic (DPL) countermeasure family. The strength of our method is that it uses intrinsic characteristics of the countermeasure: classical methods fail when the countermeasure is perfect, whereas our method still works and enables us to perform advanced attacks. We have experimentally validated the proposed method by attacking a DES cryptoprocessor embedded in a Field Programmable Gates Array (FPGA), and protected by the Wave Dynamic Differential Logic (WDDL) countermeasure. This successful attack, unambiguous as the full key is retrieved, is the first to be reported.

Keywords: Field Programmable Gates Array (FPGA); Side-Channel Analysis (SCA); Differential Power Analysis (DPA); ElectroMagnetic Analysis (EMA); Dual-rail with Precharge Logic (DPL); Wave Dynamic Differential Logic (WDDL); Field Programmable Gates Array (FPGA).

Domains: Micro and nanotechnologies/Microelectronics

Laurent Sauvage, Sylvain Guilley, Jean-Luc Danger, Yves Mathieu, Maxime Nassar. Successful Attack on an FPGA-based WDDL DES Cryptoprocessor Without Place and Route Constraints.. Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition, 2009. DATE '09., Apr 2009, NICE, France. pp.640-645. ⟨hal-00325417v3⟩