An automatic design flow for implementation of side channel attacks resistant crypto-chips

Abstract

Recently, it has been proven that asynchronous circuits possess considerable inherent countermeasure against side channel attacks. In spite of these systems' advantages for immune cryptography, because of the lack of automatic design tools and standard methods, exploiting such schemes faces difficulties. In this paper, a fully automated secure design flow and a set of secure library cells resistant to power analysis and fault injection attacks are introduced for QDI asynchronous circuits. In this flow a standard cell library has been introduced which has resistance to differential power analysis on faulty hardware attack. The results show that using this scheme is approximately 5.62 times more balanced than the best cells designed using previous synchronous balancing methods. To verify the efficiency of our presented flow we applied it to implementation of the AES cryptography algorithm. Also, this implementation shows a 2.8 times throughput improvement over the synchronous implementation using the same technology. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.