A High-Efficiency Power Obfuscation Switched-Capacitor DC–DC Converter Architecture
Nikita Mirchandani, Majid Sabbagh, Yunsi Fei, Aatmesh Shrivastava · IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems · 2024
Side channel attacks (SCA) have been shown to be very effective in breaking cryptographic engines. In this paper, we present a new power obfuscation switched capacitor (POSC) DC-DC converter. To a first order approximation, it equalizes the charge such that the same amount of charge is drawn from the input power supply in each cycle. We evaluated the design by analyzing the power supply to an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) unit powered by the proposed converter. CPA fails after evaluation with 10k traces. Two different topologies of the switched capacitor circuit are analyzed for their contribution to side channel power information leakage. The three phase POSC is designed with both switched capacitor converters (SCC1 and SCC2) and achieves efficiency of 77% and 70%.