A Standard Cell-Based DPA Attack Countermeasure using Homogeneous Dual-Rail Logic (HDRL)

DPA (Differential Power Analysis) attacks statistically find the correlation between power consumption and secret data in crypto-hardware. WDDL (Wave Dynamic Differential Logic) is a standard cell-based countermeasure for DPA and guarantees a 100% switching factor to shield the power information. However, our experiments observe that WDDL fails to compensate the power imbalance. This paper proposes Homogeneous Dual-Rail Logic (HDRL), a standard cell DPA attack countermeasure that theoretically guarantees fully balanced power consumption and significantly improves DPA attack resistivity. Our experimental results on the AES SBox circuit show that HDRL successfully prevents DPA attacks in all cases. In addition, HDRL achieves such higher security with only 100.0% energy overhead while WDDL incurs 231.7% energy overhead. Also, HDRL requires the same area overhead as WDDL. HDRL’s better resistivity and lower energy overhead make it a promising countermeasure for standard cell based embedded crypto-applications such as smart cards.