On-board decoupling of cryptographic FPGA to improve tolerance to side-channel attacks

One of PI/EMC design techniques, on-board decoupling, was proved its possibility to be used as a countermeasure against cryptographic side-channel analysis attack. The on-board decoupling was applied to a side-channel attack standard evaluation board (SASEBO-G) involving a cryptographic FPGA that operated an AES-128 encryption process. Two decoupling conditions were examined. Radio frequency (RF) power current was detected with a current probe that was placed on a power cable connected to SASEBO-G for the cryptographic FPGA. Traces of the RF power current were recorded repeatedly with a digital oscilloscope until 30,000 traces were acquired in each decoupling condition. The traces were analyzed statistically by using the correlation power analysis (CPA). Results of CPA show that necessary number of traces to reveal the secret key significantly increased when the RF power current was attenuated by decoupling over the dominant frequency range in spectra of the RF power current. The decoupling technique can be useful as a countermeasure of side-channel analysis attacks to cryptographic modules.