PARC: A Novel Design Methodology for Power Analysis Resilient Circuits Using Spintronics

A prevalent class of side-channel attacks relies on Differential Power Analysis (DPA) methods, which monitor power traces during cryptographic processing to discover secret keys. Reconfigurability via Polymorphic Gate Modules (PGMs) offers an approach to obscure DPA information by dynamically rearranging the operation of constituent sub-circuits, albeit at the cost of increased area and power consumption. Thus, we develop the Power Analysis-Resilient Circuit (PARC) design methodology to instantiate the use of spin-based devices as an extension to conventional Register Transfer Language (RTL) specifications. PARC replaces a specific portion of the circuit to maximize a new Effectiveness of Design (EoD) metric, which quantifies DPA impact versus its performance overhead. To validate functionality, PARC is applied to various benchmark circuits including ISCAS-89, MCNC, and ITC-99. EoD results indicate that PARC significantly increases the number of power traces that an adversary would need to use in order to extract power information but incurs a low cost to the functional circuit itself.