Improved Power/EM Side-Channel Attack Resistance of 128-Bit AES Engines With Random Fast Voltage Dithering

This paper demonstrates the improved power and electromagnetic (EM) side-channel attack (SCA) resistance of 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) engines in 130-nm CMOS using random fast voltage dithering (RFVD) enabled by integrated voltage regulator (IVR) with the bond-wire inductors and an on-chip all-digital clock modulation (ADCM) circuit. RFVD scheme transforms the current signatures with random variations in AES input supply while adding random shifts in the clock edges in the presence of global and local supply noises. The measured power signatures at the supply node of the AES engines show upto 37× reduction in peak for higher order test vector leakage assessment (TVLA) metric and upto 692× increase in minimum traces required to disclose (MTD) the secret encryption key with correlation power analysis (CPA). Similarly, SCA on the measured EM signatures from the chip demonstrates a reduction of upto 11.3× in TVLA peak and upto 37× increase in correlation EM analysis (CEMA) MTD.