Analysis of Countermeasures Techniques Against Side-Channel Attacks on Electronic Circuits: A Review

Abstract

Side-channel attacks (SCAs) exploit unintended physical leakages in digital systems, such as power consumption, electromagnetic emissions, and execution time, to extract sensitive information, including cryptographic keys. This article presents a comprehensive comparative study of several families of countermeasures, including masking, logic balancing (hiding), randomization, and selected combinations of these approaches; then, an enhanced countermeasure algorithm is proposed to improve the security of digital systems in the era when AI is challenging the security of these systems. The countermeasures were implemented at the register-transfer level (RTL) on the open-source RISC-V Ibex processor core. The proposed algorithm was evaluated using a reproducible methodology based on RTL simulation. Two cryptographic algorithms were selected as case studies: AES-128 and Ascon. The analysis results demonstrate that current countermeasures need significant improvements to cope with the challenging security vulnerabilities