Charge recovery logic as a side channel attack countermeasure

Basically, charge recovery logic styles have been devised for low-power purposes. However, they have some other characteristics such as inherent pipelining mechanism, low data-dependent power consumption, and low electromagnetic radiations which are usually neglected by researchers. These properties can be useful in other application areas such as side channel attack resistant cryptographic hardware. This paper addresses these properties of charge recovery logics and examines a common one, called 2N-2N2P, as a side channel attack countermeasure by information theoretic evaluation metrics. The observed results show that the usage of this logic style leads to improve DPA-resistance as well as energy saving. Moreover, The behavior of supply currents in simulations reveals that electromagnetic emanation seems to be feeble, compared to other cell level DPA countermeasures.