Gate-Level Side-Channel Leakage Assessment with Architecture Correlation Analysis

Abstract: While side-channel leakage is traditionally evaluated from a fabricated chip, it is more time-efficient and cost-effective to do so during the design phase of the chip. We present a methodology to rank the gates of a design according to their contribution to the side-channel leakage of the chip. The methodology relies on logic synthesis, logic simulation, gate-level power estimation, and gate leakage assessment to compute a ranking. The ranking metric can be defined as a specific test by correlating gate-level activity with a leakage model, or else as a non-specific test by evaluating gate-level activity in response to distinct test vector groups. Our results show that only a minority of the gates in a design contribute most of the side-channel leakage. We demonstrate this property for several designs, including a hardware AES coprocessor and a cryptographic hardware/software interface in a five-stage pipelined RISC processor.