SC-DDPL: A Novel Standard-Cell Based Approach for Counteracting Power Analysis Attacks in the Presence of Unbalanced Routing

Abstract

In this paper we present the Standard Cell Delay-based Dual-rail Pre-charge Logic (SC-DDPL), a novel logic style which is able to counteract Power Analysis Attacks (PAAs) also in the presence of capacitive mismatch at the output of dual-rail gates. The SC-DDPL is based on a standard-cell design flow and it is suitable to be implemented on ASICs or FPGAs without any routing constraint on differential lines, supporting the Time Enclosed Logic protocol along with a DPL structure. The security provided by SC-DDPL has been firstly investigated in simulation on some basic logic gates, designed adopting a commercial 40nm CMOS technology. Simulated experiments have highlighted the capability of SC-DDPL gates to guarantee a high-level of security also in presence of extreme capacitive mismatch, exhibiting strongly reduced NED/NSD metrics, as well as a reduction of the FED, compared to a reference RTZ-based WDDL implementation. In order to compare the proposed logic against other state-of-the-art countermeasures we have implemented a 4bit PRESENT crypto-core adopting several logic styles, evaluating different security metrics on a 65nm Intel Cyclone-IV FPGA. Experimental results have confirmed that the SC-DDPL outperforms other gate-level countermeasures in terms of security metrics with a reasonable area and power consumption overhead.