Power-aware hiding method for S-box protection

A power analysis attack countermeasure, called power-awareness-based hiding, is proposed. It is effective in implementing nonlinear operations, S-boxes, in cryptographic algorithms. An advanced encryption standard (AES) S-box circuit has been implemented in this approach using the Domino logic array style. The post-layout simulation results show that the power-aware hiding AES S-box achieves a delay of 1.56 ns and a mean power consumption of 3.57 mW. The proposed method improves the power delay product by 65%, the normalised energy deviation by 43% and the normalised standard deviation by 30% compared to other secure methods.