Countermeasures against EM analysis for a secured FPGA-based AES implementation

Side-channel analysis is one of the most efficient techniques available to an attacker to break the security of a cryptographic device. Started as monitoring of computation time or power, it has evolved into considering several other possible information leakage sources, such as electromagnetic (EM) emissions. EM waves can be a very attractive means to attack a cryptographic implementation: they are contactless, and their intrinsic spatial, temporal, and frequency information can be a source of leakage richer than power consumption. Existing countermeasures may be thus insufficient against an EM attack and new solutions must be found and validated. In this paper, we describe a set of dedicated countermeasures protecting against EM analysis and validate them with real experimental campaigns on a Xilinx FPGA.