side-channel attacks

Side-channel attack (SCA) has shown to be a serious implementation attack to many cryptosystems. Practical countermeasures only mitigate the vulnerability to some extent. Considerable research efforts on leakage-resilient cryptography have so far not led to practical leakage-resilient implementations. One hindering reason is the lack of commonly accepted and sound metrics, standards, and evaluation procedures to measure and evaluate the vulnerability/resilience of cryptosystems to various side-channel attacks.

Physical side channels pose a big threat to the security of embedded hardware. The differential power analysis (DPA) attack is a well known side channel threat which exploits the linear dependence of the power on the secret data or an intermediate value correlated to the secret data through statistical model building. This project addresses the DPA vulnerability by deploying a technology cell library consisting of private gates. The technique developed will make embedded hardware less vulnerable to side-channel attacks, thereby securing private user data and transactions.