Paper 2016/1135

Static Power Side-Channel Analysis of a Threshold Implementation Prototype Chip

Thorben Moos, Amir Moradi, and Bastian Richter

Abstract

The static power consumption of modern CMOS devices has become a substantial concern in the context of the side-channel security of cryptographic hardware. The continuous growth of the leakage power dissipation in nanometer-scaled CMOS technologies is not only inconvenient for effective low power designs, but does also create a new target for power analysis adversaries. In this paper, we present the first experimental results of a static power side-channel analysis targeting an ASIC implementation of a provably first-order secure hardware masking scheme. The investigated 150 nm CMOS prototype chip realizes the PRESENT-80 lightweight block cipher as a threshold implementation and allows us to draw a comparison between the information leakage through its dynamic and static power consumption. By employing a sophisticated measurement setup dedicated to static power analysis, including a very low-noise DC amplifier as well as a climate chamber, we are able to recover the key of our target implementation with significantly less traces compared to the corresponding dynamic power analysis attack. In particular, for a successful third-order attack exploiting the static currents, less than 200 thousand traces are needed. Whereas for the same attack in the dynamic power domain around 5 million measurements are required. Furthermore, we are able to show that only-first-order resistant approaches like the investigated threshold implementation do not significantly increase the complexity of a static power analysis. Therefore, we firmly believe that this side channel can actually become the target of choice for real-world adversaries against masking countermeasures implemented in advanced CMOS technologies.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. DATE 2017
Keywords
side-channel analysismasking
Contact author(s)
amir moradi @ rub de
History
2016-12-08: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/1135
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/1135,
      author = {Thorben Moos and Amir Moradi and Bastian Richter},
      title = {Static Power Side-Channel Analysis of a Threshold Implementation Prototype Chip},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2016/1135},
      year = {2016},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1135}
}
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