CAD4EM-P: Security-Driven Placement Tools for Electromagnetic Side Channel Protection
Haocheng Ma, Jiaji He, Yanjiang Liu, Yiqiang Zhao, Yier Jin · 2019
Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) attacks are major threats to hardware security. Upon this security threat, various countermeasures at different design layers have been proposed against SCA attacks. These approaches often introduce significant performance overheads and impose high requirements of side-channel security backgrounds to IC designers. In this paper, we propose an automatic computer-aided design (CAD) tool that can enhance the circuit resistance against electromagnetic (EM) SCA attacks. This new tool will guide a security-driven placement process and can be seamlessly integrated into the modern IC design flow. The protected IC design will be resilient to SCA attacks with negligible area and power overheads. In order to develop this tool, we first investigate the root-cause of EM leakage at layout level and mathematically demonstrate the feasibility of security-driven placement through the EM leakage modeling. We then identify that the correlation between the data under protection and the EM leakage can be significantly reduced through data-dependent registers reallocation. Simulation results on cryptographic circuits prove the effectiveness of both the constructed EM leakage model and the EM model based CAD tool for EM security.