On the importance of the number of fanouts to prevent the glitches in DPA-resistant devices

Abstract

During the last years several logic styles have been proposed to counteract power analysis attacks. This article starts with a brief review of four different logic styles namely RSL, MDLP, DRSL, and TDPL. This discussion continues to examine the effect of the number of fanouts in power consumption of a CMOS inverter. Moreover, it is shown that insertion of delay elements in typical CMOS circuits is not adequate to prevent the glitches and information leakage unless the fanouts of input signals are balanced. Whereas enable signals have to be classified according to the depth of combinational circuits implemented using pre-charge logic styles, we show that the number of fanouts of enable signals (which is equal to the number of gates in each depth) is a significant factor in determining the interval between arrival time of the consecutive enable signals. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.