Power Noise Measurements of Cryptographic VLSI Circuits Regarding Side-Channel Information Leakage

Power supply noise waveforms within cryptographic VLSI circuits in a 65nm CMOS technology are captured by using an on-chip voltage waveform monitor (OCM). The waveforms exhibit the correlation of dynamic voltage drops to internal logical activities during Advance Encryption Standard (AES) processing, and causes side-channel information leakage regarding to secret key bytes. Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) is the method of an attack extracting such information leakage from the waveforms. The frequency components of power supply noise contributing the leakage are shown to be localized in an extremely low frequency region. The level of information leakage is strongly associated with the size of increment of dynamic voltage drops against the Hamming distance in the AES processing. The time window of significant importance where the leakage most likely happens is clearly designated within a single clock cycle in the final stage of AES processing. The on-chip power supply noise measurements unveil the facts about side-channel information leakage behind the traditional CPA with on-board sensing of power supply current through a resistor of 1 ohm.