Optimal Energy Efficient Design of Artificial Noise to Prevent Side-Channel Attacks

How to prevent side-channel attacks (SCAs) has become an important problem for securing modern cryptographic devices. One of the widely used countermeasures to against power SCAs is the injection of random noise sequence into the raw leakage traces. However, the indiscriminate injection of random noise can lead to significant increases in energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an optimal energy efficient design for artificial noise to prevent side-channel attacks. We model the side-channel as a communication channel, which allows us to use channel capacity to measure the mutual information between the secret and the leakage traces. For a given energy budget in the noise generation, we obtain the optimal design of the artificial noise injection by solving the side-channel’s channel capacity minimization problem.