A new countermeasure against scan-based side-channel attacks

Abstract

Scan design has been widely used to facilitate the testing of integrated circuits (ICs). However, it also provides attackers a side-channel to access the internal states of crypto chips and thus becomes a great threat to the security of the cipher keys. We propose a secure scan design scheme to protect crypto chips against such scan-based side-channel attacks. In this scheme, we introduce a shift register to control the working mode of certain scan cells. Only when the user configures the shift register correctly, can the scan design work normally under testing mode. We show that the proposed secure scan design can effectively resist the existing scan-based attacks. We also demonstrate that this approach has low area overhead while maintaining the testability of original design.