AES design space exploration new line for scan attack resiliency

Crypto-chips are vulnerable to side-channel attacks. Scan attack is one such side-channel attack which uses the scan-based DFT test infrastructure to leak the secret information of the crypto-chip. In the presence of scan, an attacker can run the chip in normal mode, and then by switching to the test mode, retrieve the intermediate results of the crypto-chip. Using only a few input-output pairs one can retrieve the entire secret key. Almost all the scan attacks on AES crypto-chip use the same iterative 128-bit AES design where the round register is placed exactly after the round operation. However, the attack potency may vary depending on the design of AES. In this work, we consider various designs of AES. We shed light on the impact of design style on the scan attack. We also consider response compaction in our analysis. We show that certain design decisions deliver inherent resistance to scan attack.

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