An Efficient Hiding Countermeasure with Xilinx MMCM Primitive in Spread Mode

The Mixed-Mode Clock Manager (MMCM) is a primitive in Xilinx FPGAs that is designed for generating a wide range of output clock frequencies by utilizing a fixed input clock signal. It has been applied to numerous cryptographic devices to improve their side-channel attack resistance. This paper proposes an efficient hiding countermeasure by using the MMCM in spread spectrum mode. In our suggested architecture, the hardware implementation is given by random dynamic frequency-hopping signals. We could achieve better effectiveness in the occupied bandwidth metrics and found 223 available parameter sets, which is significantly smaller than using 219k distinct sets in a previous study, namely a random dynamic frequency scaling countermeasure. The experimental results indicate that a recent deep learning-based leakage assessment requires nearly one million traces to detect leakage points, whereas the well-known t-test methodology cannot detect any information leakage in five million measurements. Furthermore, this countermeasure is capable of withstanding both conventional and sliding window-based Correlation Power Analysis attacks, despite utilizing up to five million power traces.