PoSyn: Secure Power Side-Channel Aware Synthesis

Abstract: Power Side-Channel (PSC) attacks exploit power consumption patterns to extract sensitive information, posing risks to cryptographic operations crucial for secure systems. Traditional countermeasures, such as masking, face challenges including complex integration during synthesis, substantial area overhead, and susceptibility to optimization removal during logic synthesis. To address these issues, we introduce PoSyn, a novel logic synthesis framework designed to enhance cryptographic hardware resistance against PSC attacks. Our method centers on optimal bipartite mapping of vulnerable RTL components to standard cells from the technology library, aiming to minimize PSC leakage. By utilizing a cost function integrating critical characteristics from both the RTL design and the standard cell library, we strategically modify mapping criteria during RTL-to-netlist conversion without altering design functionality. Furthermore, we theoretically establish that PoSyn minimizes mutual information leakage, strengthening its security against PSC vulnerabilities. We evaluate PoSyn across various cryptographic hardware implementations, including AES, RSA, PRESENT, and post-quantum cryptographic algorithms such as Saber and CRYSTALS-Kyber, at technology nodes of 65nm, 45nm, and 15nm. Experimental results demonstrate a substantial reduction in success rates for Differential Power Analysis (DPA) and Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) attacks, achieving lows of 3% and 6%, respectively. TVLA analysis further confirms that synthesized netlists exhibit negligible leakage. Additionally, compared to conventional countermeasures like masking and shuffling, PoSyn significantly lowers attack success rates, achieving reductions of up to 72%, while simultaneously enhancing area efficiency by as much as 3.79 times.