An energy efficient AES engine with DPA-resistance

The advent of portable electronics which transmit and receive sensitive data via wireless communication have led to interest in the design of energy-efficient security engines. The hardware implementation of cryptographic algorithms, however, leaks side-channel information about the operations they process. Differential Power Analysis (DPA) is one of the most powerful attacks to disclose secret key of the engine. This thesis proposes an energy efficient AES-128 engine which is resilient to DPA attacks. A proposed design adopts extensive parallelism and voltage scaling to simultaneously achieve energy efficiency and throughput requirement. Optimized 128-bit architecture and 16 S-boxes placed in the encryption datapath allow the parallel operation of 16 bytes of encryption data at supply voltages in the subthreshold region while maintaining more than tens of Mbps throughput rate. The energy efficient AES core, which does not incorporate techniques to mitigate DPA attack, can operate at 0.35V with 54.12pJ/encrypt. and 64.6Mbps. Before developing countermeasures against DPA, a previously suggested DPA attack methodology in [1] is studied and modified to disclose secret key of our system. The transition power of register is estimated by using the byte-oriented reverse algorithm of AES with the knowledge of a ciphertext and a guess of a secret key. Correlation between the power estimate and the power measurement discloses 12 key bytes (among 16) within 20K encryption runs. A newly proposed AES architecture which balances the Hamming weight of register input can protect the system from DPA attacks.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Chung, Hye Won

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Anantha P. Chandrakasan.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/55146

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/55146