This paper investigates the design of a data flip-flop compatible with the three-phase dual-rail pre-charge logic (TDPL) family. TDPL is a differential power analysis (DPA) resistant dual-rail logic style whose power consumption is insensitive to unbalanced load conditions, based on a three phase operation where, in order to obtain a constant energy consumption, an additional discharge phase is performed after pre-charge and evaluation. In this work, the TDPL basic gates operation is shortly summarized and the TDPL flip-flop implementation is reported. A part of an encryption algorithm is used as case a study to prove the effectiveness of the proposed circuit. Simulation results in a 65 nm CMOS process show an improvement in the energy consumption balancing in excess of 10 times with respect to the state of the art.

This paper investigates the design of a dual-rail precharge logic family whose power consumption is insensitive to unbalanced load conditions thus allowing adopting a semi-custom design flow (automatic place and route) without any constraint on the routing of the complementary wires. The proposed logic is based on a novel encoding concept where the information is represented in the time domain rather than in the spatial domain as in a standard dual-rail logic. In this work, a logic family which exploits the proposed concept has been implemented. Implementation details and simulation results are reported which show a power consumption independent of the sequence of processed data and routing capacitances. An improvement in the energy consumption balancing up to 50 times and an area reduction up to 60% with respect to the state of the art have been obtained.

The susceptibility of cryptographic devices to attacks based on power analysis can be both significantly and efficiently tested at early design steps. The results from a real case application show the advantages of the approach.

Attacks based on a differential power analysis (DPA) are a main threat when designing cryptographic functions for implementation on chip cards. In this paper, a dynamic and differential lookup table (LUT) is presented and evaluated on a case study simulation. The proposed circuit shows a power consumption independent from the input data and can be employed to implement combinatorial functions in cryptographic processors when a high resistance against tampering is required. A typical application is the design of nonlinear functions (for example, substitution boxes) since protecting them with less expensive countermeasures (for example, random masking) implies a significant overhead. In the adopted case study, a 1.02 percent spread in the power consumption has been obtained when parasitic capacitances are taken into account. Moreover, a comparison with a static complementary metal-oxide semiconductor implementation shows an acceptable overhead in terms of area and power consumption.

A novel current measuring technique is introduced which promises to substantially enhance power analysis attacks against cryptographic co-processors. The proposed technique exploits an active circuit to measure the instantaneous current consumption of a device under attack while supplying, at the same time, the device with a stable voltage. Higher gain-bandwidth product, higher sensitivity and lower insertion error are the main advantages with respect to a resistor-based measurement. Experimental results when the proposed circuit is used to measure the current consumption of an FPGA are reported and the achievable advantage in terms of sensitivity is discussed too

A new, patent pending, concept for a random bit generator, suitable to be integrated in a cryptographic device, is presented. The proposed circuit exploits the relative jitter between two identical ring oscillators sharing the same delay elements and shows several advantages with respect to other oscillator-based generators reported in the technical literature. In particular, the generator is stateless and therefore easily testable accordingly to what is reported in (Bucci, 2005). Moreover, the generation throughput is automatically adapted to the available noise in the circuit thus guaranteeing the statistical quality (minimum entropy) of the generated bits. To validate the proposed circuit, simulation results on a 0.12mum CMOS process are reported

The design of a high-speed IC random number source macro-cell, suitable for integration in a smart card microcontroller, is presented. The oscillator sampling technique is exploited and a jittered oscillator which features an amplified thermal noise source has been designed in order to increase the output throughput and the statistical quality of the generated bit sequences. The oscillator feedback loop acts as an offset compensation for the noise amplifier, thus solving one of the major issues in this kind of circuit. A numerical model for the proposed system has been developed which allows us to carry out an analytical expression for the transition probability between successive bits in the output stream. A prototype chip has been fabricated in a standard digital 0.18 /spl mu/m n-well CMOS process which features a 10 Mbps throughput and fulfills the NIST FIPS and correlation-based tests for randomness. The macro-cell area, excluding pads, is 0.0016 mm/sup 2/ (184 /spl mu/m /spl times/ 86 /spl mu/m) and a 2.3 mW power consumption has been measured.