Counteracting leakage power analysis attack using random ring oscillators

Leakage power analysis (LPA) attacks aim at recovering the secret key of a cryptographic device from measurements of its static (leakage) power, as opposite to traditional power analysis attacks that are focused on the dynamic power. This novel power analysis attacks take advantage of the dependence of the leakage power of CMOS integrated circuits on the data they process. With the development of integrated circuits technology, LPA attacks are becoming a serious threat to the information security of cryptographic circuits in sub-100-nm technologies. This paper proposes a LPA countermeasure circuit based on random ring oscillators, which efficiently resists the LPA attacks. The implementation of the critical S-Box of the advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm shows that using countermeasure of random ring oscillators can thwart LPA attack. Moreover, the countermeasure circuit can be mounted onto different symmetric algorithm which has S-Box architecture. Based on our approach, a LPA-resistant AES chip can be proposed to maintain the same throughput with less than 2K extra gates. Simulation results show the countermeasure proposed in this paper is a promising approach to implement a LPA-resistant crypto processor.