A novel countermeasure for power attacks

Differential Power Analysis (DPA) is a Side Channel Attack (SCA) method that breaks a cryptographic circuit by correlating the power consumption and the applied inputs. A lot of research has been done in counteracting DPA Attacks but most of the dual rail DPA resistant logic styles exhibit load dependent power consumption and hence their performance decreases for unbalanced capacitances. To address this issue we present a novel dynamic differential logic style. It is a generic reconfigurable logic unit which performs 8 functions. By using three phase logic and removing load dependent power consumption in evaluation and discharge phase, our proposed logic style is insensitive to unbalanced capacitances. A significant improvement in DPA resistance is observed when compared with existing DPA resistant logic styles at the cost of area.