
Security at low cost is an important factor for cryptographic hardware implementations. Unfortunately, the security of cryptographic implementations is threatened by Side Channel Analysis (SCA). SCA attempts to discover the secret key of a device by exploiting implementation characteristics and bypassing the algorithm's mathematical security. Differential Power Analysis (DPA) is a type of SCA, which exploits the device's power consumption characteristics. Several countermeasures to DPA have been proposed, however, all of them increase security at the cost of increased area which in-turn leads to increased power consumption and reduced throughput. FPGAs are popular due to their reconfigurability, lower development cost, off-the-shelf availability and shorter time to market. Block RAMs (BRAM) are large memories in FPGAs that are commonly used as ROM, FIFO, Look-up tables, etc. In this paper we explore the DPA resistance of BRAMs in Xilinx FPGAs and verify if their usage can improve the security. The results of our Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) implementations show that using BRAMs alone can improve the security over a look-up table (LUT) only design 9 times. Applying Separated Dynamic Differential Logic (SDDL) for FPGAs, a countermeasure against DPA, to this design doubles the security again leading to an 18 fold increase over the unprotected LUT design.
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 22 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Top 10% | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% |
