ASIC-resistant proof of work based on power analysis of low-end microcontrollers

Abstract

Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC)-resistant Proof-of-Work (PoW) is widely adopted in modern cryptocurrency. The operation of ASIC-resistant PoW on ASIC is designed to be inefficient due to its special features. In this paper, we firstly introduce a novel ASIC-resistant PoW for low-end microcontrollers. We utilized the measured power trace during the cryptographic function on certain input values. Afterward, the post-processing routine was performed on the power trace to remove the noise. The refined power trace is always constant information depending on input values. By performing the hash function with the power trace, the final output was obtained. This framework only works on microcontrollers and the power trace depends on certain input values, which is not predictable and computed by ASIC.