A High-Efficiency Power Obfuscation Switched-Capacitor DC–DC Converter Architecture

Side-channel attacks (SCAs) have been shown to be very effective in breaking cryptographic engines. In this article, we present a new power obfuscation switched-capacitor (POSC) dc–dc converter. To a first-order approximation, it equalizes the charge such that the same amount of charge is drawn from the input power supply in each cycle. We evaluated the design by analyzing the power supply to an advanced encryption standard (AES) unit powered by the proposed converter. CPA fails after evaluation with
$10k$
traces. Two different topologies of the switched-capacitor circuit are analyzed for their contribution to side-channel power information leakage. The three-phase POSC is designed with both switched-capacitor converters (SCC1 and SCC2) and achieves efficiency of 77% and 70%.