A low cost DPA-resistant 8-bit AES core based on ring oscillators

This work presents a 8-bit low cost AES core with DPA resistance for resource-limited applications. Based on our approach by using ring oscillators, the protection with no throughput penalty can effectively keep the design from DPA attacks. Both of the elegant control mechanism and logic sharing are employed to further reduce power consumption and area overhead. After implemented in UMC 90 nm CMOS technology, our approach costing 3.32K gates with 6.9% overhead can achieve 178Mb/s throughput and 201uW power consumption, showing that this design is comparable with other unprotected low cost designs. Furthermore, the countermeasure circuit protects the key information from DPA attack after evaluated by 15000 traces.