Lightweight Cryptography and DPA Countermeasures: A Survey

The dawning Ubiquitous Computing age demands a new attacker model for the myriads of pervasive computing devices used: since a potentially malicious user is in full control over the pervasive device, additionally to the cryptographic attacks the whole field of physical attacks has to be considered. Most notably are here so-called side channel attacks, such as Differential Power Analysis (DPA) attacks. At the same time, the deployment of pervasive devices is strongly cost-driven, which prohibits expensive countermeasures. In this article we survey a broad range of countermeasures and discuss their suitability for ultraconstrained devices, such as passive RFID-tags. We conclude that adiabatic logic countermeasures, such as 2N-2N2P and SAL, seem to be promising candidates, because they increase the resistance against DPA attacks while at the same time lowering the power consumption of the pervasive device.