Energy-efficient data scrambling on memory-processor interfaces

Abstract

Crypto-processors are prone to security attacks based on the observation of their power consumption profile. We propose new techniques for increasing the non-determinism of such a profile, which rely on the idea of introducing randomness in the bus data transfers. This is achieved by combining data scrambling with energy-efficient bus encoding, thus providing high information protection at no energy cost. Results on a set of bus traces originated by real-life applications demonstrate the applicability of the proposed solution.