Invited paper: Low power requirements and side-channel protection of encryption engines: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Power attack is a critical challenge to security of encryption engines. Countermeasures to side-channel attacks often come at high power, area, or performance overhead. Therefore, design of side-channel secure encryption engines is a critical challenge for power-/resource-constrained platforms. This paper discusses that although low-power need imposes critical challenge for side-channel security, but circuit techniques traditionally developed for power management also present new opportunities for side-channel resistance. As a case-study, we show the feasibility of using integrated voltage regulator, normally used for efficient power management, for increasing side-channel resistance of AES engines.