Tutorial: Recent Circuit Advances for Resilience to Side-Channel Attacks

Computationally secure cryptographic algorithms, when implemented on physical hardware, leak correlated physical signatures (e.g. power supply current, electromagnetic radiation, acoustic, thermal) which could be utilized to break the crypto engine. Physical-layer countermeasures, guided by understanding of the physical leakage, including circuit-level and layout-level countermeasures promise strong resilience by reducing the physical leakage at the source of the leakage itself. The past decade has seen significant advancements in circuit-level countermeasures, advancing resilience to side-channel attacks. In this tutorial, we will cover the fundamentals of the leakages and how each countermeasure increases resilience, by diving into the working mechanism of each and comparing the pros and cons of these techniques. The tutorial concludes by highlighting the open problems and future needs of this field.