On the Influence of Cell Libraries and Other Parameters to SCA Resistance of Crypto IP Cores

The ever-growing complexity of modern systems as well as the shrinking time to market enforces the use of already designed hardware components i.e. hard and soft IP cores. The fact that also requirements with respect to security significantly increased and that side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks are meanwhile a well-known threat it is paramount to ensure SCA resistance of ASICs and FPGA implementations derived from cryptographic IP cores. This requires to evaluate this feature for each IP core and target technology even down to the level of the cell library. The experiments reported here clearly show that the three available cell libraries even though developed for the same 130nm technology of IHP exhibit different sensitivity to SCA attacks ranging from quite resistant to very vulnerable.