Leveraging on-chip voltage regulators as a countermeasure against side-channel attacks

Abstract

Side-channel attacks have become a significant threat to the integrated circuit security. Circuit level techniques are pro-posed in this paper as a countermeasure against side-channel attacks. A distributed on-chip power delivery system con-sisting of multi-level switched capacitor (SC) voltage con-verters is proposed where the individual interleaved stages are turned on and turned off either based on the workload information or pseudo-randomly to scramble the power con-sumption profile. In the case that the changes in the work-load demand do not trigger the power delivery system to turn on or off individual stages, the active stages are reshuf-fled with so called converter-reshuffling to insert random spikes in the power consumption profile. An entropy based metric is developed to evaluate the security-performance of the proposed converter-reshuffling technique as compared to three other existing on-chip power delivery schemes. The in-crease in the power trace entropy with CoRe scheme is also demonstrated with simulation results to further verify the theoretical analysis. Categories and Subject Descriptors SEC1.3 [Hardware Security]: Device, circuit, and archi-tecture techniques for security Keywords Side-channel attacks, on-chip voltage regulation, power effi-ciency 1