Early feedback on side channel risks with accelerated toggle-counting

Abstract—Early detection of side-channel leakage in the design of a digital crypto-circuit is as important as getting the design functionally correct. Currently, side-channel leakage is confirmed by measuring actual prototypes, or by detailed SPICE-level simulations of the hardware model. However, this feedback does not help the designer: it comes either too late (after the implementation), or else it has unreasonable simulation-time requirements. In this paper, we present a design method to provide early feedback on side-channel leakage based on toggle-counting. We show how to abstract the low-level circuit effects, such as glitches and routing imbalances, into high-level simulation models that can be toggle-counted. Furthermore, we propose an acceleration method for fast toggle-counting using reconfigurable hardware. The proposed methods accelerate the evaluation of side-channel leakage by a factor of 10 5 over comparable SPICE-level simulations. Keywords- Side-Channel Attack; High-level Simulation