Low-overhead countermeasures to protect Pre-charged busses against Power Analysis attacks

Abstract

In this paper, novel circuit techniques are proposed to enhance the resistance of precharged busses against Power Analysis attacks. Indeed, a low-power low-area bus coding scheme is used to make power consumption nominally constant. In addition, a simple scrambling technique is developed in order to make the bus robust against attacks even in the presence of process variations or load unbalance. The proposed techniques are shown to be more efficient than the traditional dual-rail pre-charged busses, both in terms of area and power consumption. Measurements confirm that the proposed technique increases the robustness of precharged.