Late Breaking Results: Configurable Ring Oscillators as a Side-Channel Countermeasure

Side-channel attacks are a threat to computing devices. In this work, we propose a novel countermeasure against power analysis side-channel attacks. This countermeasure uses ring oscillators with runtime-configurable chain lengths to generate noise to hide the effects of the secret intermediate values on the device’s power consumption. We develop our countermeasure to be compatible with a state-of-the-art of side-channel-attack detection mechanism. Therefore, our solution does not incur any extra area overhead as it uses a subset of the circuit needed for detection. We evaluate our countermeasure using the test vector leakage assessment test (TVLA test). When our countermeasure is active no side-channel leakage could be detected.