Designing DPA Resistant Circuits Using BDD Architecture and Bottom Pre-charge Logic

Differential power analysis (DPA) attacks are the most powerful side channel attacks against cryptographic systems. In this work, a reduced ordered binary decision diagram (ROBDD) based dual rail circuit for a basic DPA resistant cell has been designed. The specialty of this cell is that the overall input current of the cell is invariant to the input combinations of data bits applied to the cell. For the first time, bottom pre-charge logic is used in the design of such a cell. The ROBDD based design minimizes both area and early propagation effect. A number of logic functions including AND, OR, XOR, NOT, NAND, NOR and also an adder, all based on the basic cell, have then been designed in a hierarchical manner. Experimental results demonstrate DPA resistance of the circuits (for example an adder) developed using this cell, outperforming other competing design with respect to peak power variance.