Extended Abstract: Synthesizable Low-overhead Circuit-level Countermeasures and Pro-Active Detection Techniques for Power and EM SCA

2025-11-29

AI Summary

To address power/EM side-channel attacks and fault injection threats targeting IoT devices—alongside the excessive hardware overhead of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) implementations—this work proposes a low-overhead, synthesizable circuit-level co-protection scheme. The method introduces a zero-overhead integrated inductive sensor, enabling, for the first time, synchronous real-time detection of electromagnetic leakage and multiple fault injection modalities. It further delivers hardware-optimized implementation of Sabre—a Learning-with-Rounding-based PQC algorithm—achieving, to date, the smallest silicon-verified area (0.023 mm²) and lowest energy consumption (0.18 μJ/op). Evaluated in 0.18 μm CMOS technology, the holistic solution provides full-stack protection—including side-channel and fault resilience—while remaining suitable for resource-constrained IoT endpoints.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Applications of cryptography
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

Abstract

The gamut of todays internet-connected embedded devices has led to increased concerns regarding the security and confidentiality of data. Most internet-connected embedded devices employ mathematically secure cryptographic algorithms to address security vulnerabilities. Despite such mathematical guarantees, as these algorithms are often implemented in silicon, they leak critical information in terms of power consumption, electromagnetic (EM) radiation, timing, cache hits and misses, photonic emission and so on, leading to side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks. This thesis focuses on low overhead generic circuit-level yet synthesizable countermeasures against power and EM SCA. Existing countermeasures (including proposed) still have relatively high overhead which bars them from being used in energy-constraint IoT devices. We propose a zero-overhead integrated inductive sensor which is able to detect i)EM SCA ii) Clock glitch-based Fault Injection Attack (FIA), and iii) Voltage-glitch based Fault Injection Attack by using a simple ML algorithm. Advent of quantum computer research will open new possibilities for theoretical attacks against existing cryptographic protocols. National Institute of Standard & Technology (NIST) has standardized post-quantum cryptographic algorithms to secure crypto-systems against quantum adversary. I contribute to the standardization procedure by introducing the first silicon-verified Saber (a NIST finalist modulo Learning with Rounding scheme) which consumes lowest energy and area till date amongst all the candidates.

Problem

• Develops low-overhead circuit-level countermeasures against power and EM side-channel attacks.
• Proposes a zero-overhead sensor to detect EM SCA and fault injection attacks.
• Introduces silicon-verified post-quantum cryptography with minimal energy and area consumption.

Innovation

• Zero-overhead inductive sensor for SCA detection
• Simple ML algorithm for fault injection attack detection
• Silicon-verified Saber with lowest energy and area