S2ADC: A 12-bit, 1.25-MS/s Secure SAR ADC With Power Side-Channel Attack Resistance

When an ADC is converting a confidential analog signal into digital codes, it may expose critical hardware security loophole. By exploiting the strong correlation between output codes and supply current waveforms, attacker can perform power side-channel attack (PSA) to steal sensitive A/D conversion results by tapping of ADC. In this regard, article demonstrates two neural-network-based successive approximation register (SAR) PSA methods 12-bit, 1.25-MS/s prototype SAR with current-equalizer-based protection. The first method employs multi-layer perceptron networks (MLP-PSA), while second uses convolutional neural (CNN-PSA). With protection disabled, both MLP-PSA CNN-PSA extract from waveforms >99% bit-wise accuracy. enabled, PSA-resistance against demonstrated. same exhibits weaker but generally provides significant results.