%0 Journal Article
%T Impact of Dual Placement and Routing on WDDL Netlist Security in FPGA
%A Emna Amouri
%A Habib Mehrez
%A Zied Marrakchi
%J International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/802436
%X The wave dynamic differential logic (WDDL) has been identified as a promising countermeasure to increase the robustness of cryptographic devices against differential power attacks (DPA). However, to guarantee the effectiveness of WDDL technique, the routing in both the direct and complementary paths must be balanced. This paper tackles the problem of unbalance of dual-rail signals in WDDL design. We describe placement techniques suitable for tree-based and mesh-based FPGAs and quantify the gain they confer. Then, we introduce a timing-balance-driven routing algorithm which is architecture independent. Our placement and routing techniques proved to be very promising. In fact, they achieve a gain of 95%, 93%, and 85% in delay balance in tree-based, simple mesh, and cluster-based mesh architectures, respectively. To reduce further the switch and delay unbalance in Mesh architecture, we propose a differential pair routing algorithm that is specific to cluster-based mesh architecture. It achieves perfectly balanced routed signals in terms of wire length and switch number. 1. Introduction FPGAs are an attractive platform for cryptographic applications due to their low cost compared to full custom ASIC design and their short time to market period. In addition, their reprogrammability allows upgrading easily the cryptographic algorithm. However, unprotected hardware implementations are vulnerable to side channel attacks (SCA). It has been shown that differential power analysis (DPA) attack [1] is very powerful. DPA is capable of revealing the secret key by measuring power consumption leaked by a cryptographic device. During the last years, many countermeasures have been proposed to protect cryptographic devices against SCA. They fall into two main categories: the masking logic and the hiding logic. The principle of masking logic is to randomize the power consumption by using a random mask and thus decorrelate the intermediate data from the circuit power consumption. This technique was introduced first at algorithmic level [2] and then at gate level [3]. It has been shown that this technique can be broken by attacks based on probability density function (PDF) [4] or glitches [5]. To overcome glitch problem, masked dual rail precharge logic (MDPL) [6] has been proposed. It merges masking with dual rail dynamic logic. However, MDPL shows a high area overhead [7]. On the other side, the principle of hiding logic consists in consuming the same amount of power consumption regardless of data inputs. This is achieved by using differential logic (signals are encoded as
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijrc/2013/802436/