Dynamic Gold Code-Based Chaotic Clock for Cryptographic Designs to Counter Power Analysis Attacks

Research on side-channel attacks has recently made a lot of progress, and one of the most potential solutions is a power analysis attack. Thus, focusing on countermeasures to improve the security level of cryptographic devices is a matter of concern. This paper proposes a time-based hiding countermeasure by using a dynamic Gold code-based chaotic clock. In our work, 36.95 (143 out of 387) of parameter sets that pass two standard statistical test suites can be used to reconfigure the Gold code generator's initial vector. The experimental results demonstrate that our countermeasure helped to harden the targeted Advanced Encryption Standard against several alignment pre-processing methods. When compared to the Random Dynamic Frequency Scaling countermeasure, the number of traces required to reveal the secret key must be increased by three times, but the overhead is approximately four times lower. © 2023 Owner/Author.