Enhanced Power and Electromagnetic SCA Resistance of Encryption Engines via a Security-Aware Integrated All-Digital LDO

This article demonstrates enhanced power (P) and electromagnetic (EM) side-channel analysis (SCA) attack resistance of standard (unprotected) 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES) engines with parallel (P-AES, 128-bit) and serial (S-AES, 8-bit) datapaths and a 128-bit SIMON engine with the bit-serial (1-bit) datapath by an on-die security-aware all-digital low-dropout (DLDO) regulator. The proposed DLDO improves SCA resistance using control-loop-induced perturbations in a nominal DLDO, enhanced by a random switching noise injector (SNI) by power-stage control and a randomized reference voltage (R-VREF) generator coupled with all-digital clock modulation (ADCM). SCA performed on the measured power/EM signatures acquired from a 130-nm CMOS testchip demonstrates up to 25× reduction in test vector leakage assessment (TVLA) leakage for P-AES and 3579×, 2182×, and 500× increase in minimum-traces-to-disclose (MTD) 80% of the subkeys for P-AES, S-AES, and SIMON cores, respectively, with respect to correlation power analysis (CPA) and correlation EM analysis (CEMA).