Abstract

In this paper, we describe and analyze an island-based random dynamic voltage scaling (iRDVS) approach to thwart power side-channel attacks. We first analyze the impact of the number of independent voltage islands on the resulting signal-to-noise ratio and trace misalignment. As part of our analysis of misalignment, we propose a novel unsupervised machine learning (ML) based attack that is effective on systems with three or fewer independent voltages. Our results show that iRDVS with four voltage islands, however, cannot be broken with 200k encryption traces, suggesting that iRDVS can be effective. We finish the talk by describing an iRDVS test chip in a 12nm FinFet process that incorporates three variants of an AES-256 accelerator, all originating from the same RTL. This included a synchronous core, an asynchronous core with no protection, and a core employing the iRDVS technique using …

Date

2023

Authors

Dake Chen, Christine Goins, Maxwell Waugaman, Georgios D Dimou, Peter A Beerel

Book

Proceedings of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2023

Pages

333-338