Title:  Enhancing Side Channel Security with Fully Intergrated Inductive Voltage Regulators

Committee:

Dr. Saibal Mukhopadhyay, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Arijit Raychowdhury, ECE

Dr. Raheem Beyah, ECE

Dr. Vivek De, Intel

Dr. Satish Kumar, ME

Abstract:

Side-channel attacks (SCA) are major threats to the security of crypto-engines in SoC platforms. Existing countermeasures to improve side-channel resistance of a hardware platform suffers from area, power and performance overheads. Fully integrated inductive voltage regulators (IVR) are an integral part of energy-efficient of digital cores due to fast transient response and support for fine-grain DVFS domains and can potentially improve side channel resistance of crypto engines exploiting the isolation between the supply of the crypto-engines and the input of the IVR.
The proposed research details the potential, analysis and design of fully integrated inductive IVRs in enhancing side channel resistance of encryption engines. Analysis and characterization of various transformations, present in a baseline inductive IVR, on the power signatures from an encryption engine are discussed. An all-digital architecture of an inductive IVR suitable for integration in advanced digital process nodes is presented. A security aware IVR design technique to further improve the SCA resistance is proposed.  A prototype chip in 130nm CMOS process is developed, demonstrating the proposed methods. Finally the potential of inductive IVRs in masking electromagnetic side channel signatures from a crypto engine is discussed with measurements from the prototype test-chip showing promising results.