Improvement of linear equivalent circuit model to identify simultaneous switching noise current in cryptographic integrated circuits

The authors previously proposed a method based on a linear equivalent circuit model to predict vulnerability of cryptographic devices before fabrication. The method was verified to demonstrate the correlation power analysis attack, a major side-channel attack method, to a cryptographic device with outstanding accuracy. However, no obvious correlation was seen between the equivalent current source modeling the generation of the simultaneous switching noise (SSN) current in the circuit model and the encryption operation used in the previous study. Therefore, in this study, we improved the topology of the linear equivalent circuit model matched with the physical construction of the power distribution network (PDN) and re-identified the equivalent current source. By comparing the improved current source with the encryption operation, obvious correlations between them were found with respect to the period of the round operation and the dependency of the SSN current on the Hamming distance between successive intermediates. The improved equivalent current source was applied on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) in which an Advance Encryption Standard (AES) circuit was implemented to simulate power traces that were confirmed to coincide with measured ones. Correlation between the simulated power traces and the power model was investigated using a set of 1000 plaintexts. As a result, the correlation coefficients agreed well with those for measured power traces. Improving the equivalent circuit model topology, thus, helped to identify the SSN current generated in the FPGA during the AES operation.