Impact of Process Variations on LPA Attacks Effectiveness

In this paper, leakage power analysis (LPA) attacks aiming at recovering the secret key of a cryptographic core from measurements of its static (leakage) power are discussed. These attacks exploit the dependence of the leakage current of CMOS Integrated Circuits (ICs) on their inputs (e.g., the secret key of a cryptographic circuit). The effectiveness of this kind of attacks in presence of process variations is demonstrated for the first time in the literature showing that LPA attacks are a serious threat to information security of cryptographic circuits in sub-100 nm technologies.