Paper 2008/188 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2008/188 ↗

Information Leakage of Flip-Flops in DPA-Resistant Logic Styles

Abstract

This contribution discusses the information leakage of flip-flops for different DPA-resistant logic styles. We show that many of the proposed side-channel resistant logic styles still employ flip-flops that leak data-dependent information. Furthermore, we apply simple models for the leakage of masked flip-flops to design a new attack on circuits implemented using masked logic styles. Contrary to previous attacks on masked logic styles, our attack does not predict the mask bit and does not need detailed knowledge about the attacked device, e.g., the circuit layout. Moreover, our attack works even if all the load capacitances of the complementary logic signals are perfectly balanced and even if the PRNG is ideally unbiased. Finally, after performing the attack on DRSL, MDPL, and iMDPL circuits we show that single-bit masks do not influence the exploitability of the revealed leakage of the masked flip-flops.