An efficient hardware countermeasure against differential power analysis attack

Abstract

Extensive research on modern cryptography ensures significant mathematical immunity to conventional cryptographic attacks. However, power consumption in cryptographic hardware leak secret information. Differential power analysis attack (DPA) is such a powerful tool to extract the secret key from cryptographic devices. To defend against these DPA attacks, hiding and masking methods are widely used. But these methods increase high area overhead and performance degradation in hardware implementation. In this aspect, this paper proposes a hardware countermeasure circuit, which, is integrated hardware module with the intermediate stages in S-Box. The countermeasure circuit utilizes the dynamic power dissipation characteristics of CMOS and provides countermeasure against DPA attacks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.