Leakage Power Analysis (LPA) Attack in Breakdown Mode and Countermeasure
Weize Yu, Yiming Wen · 2018
In this paper, the leakage power analysis (LPA) attack in the breakdown mode is explored as a new kind of side-channel attacks (SCA) to leak the secret key of cryptographic circuits. As demonstrated in the simulation result, a cryptographic circuit with a conventional LPA attack countermeasure is quite vulnerable against the LPA attack in the breakdown mode due to the malfunction of the countermeasure. In order to protect the cryptographic circuit against the LPA attack in the breakdown mode, breakdown-aware power noise insertion circuit (BAPNIC) is proposed as a new LPA attack countermeasure by generating a large amplitude of random power noise to scramble the leakage power profile of the cryptographic circuit, once the cryptographic circuit is set to the breakdown mode. The result shows that the BAPNIC-based countermeasure enhances the measurement-to-disclose (MTD) value of the cryptographic circuit over 2,000 times against the LPA attack in the breakdown mode.