EQZ-LDO: A Near-Zero EDP Overhead, >10M-Attack-Resilient, Secure Digital LDO featuring Attack-Detection and Detection-Driven Protection for a Correlation-Power-Analysis-Resilient IoT Device

Abstract

This paper presents EQZ-LDO, a digital low drop-out regulator (LDO) with attack detection and detection-driven protection for side-channel attack (SCA) resiliency. It typically incurs only 0.5% energy-delay-product (EDP) overhead since the proposed detection-driven scheme exercises protection only when the AES is under attack. This enables to amortize the EDP overhead over the lifetime of an Internet of Things (IoT) device. It still achieves very strong resiliency to SCA, demonstrating the protection of a 128b AES core from >10M-trace correlation power analysis (CPA).