Monday 14 July 2025
The world of cryptography is often shrouded in mystery, but a team of researchers has managed to shine a light on a particularly dark corner – power side-channel attacks. These sneaky assaults exploit subtle fluctuations in the power consumption of devices, allowing hackers to extract sensitive information without ever accessing the device itself.
Power side-channel attacks have been around for years, but they’ve only recently gained widespread attention due to their effectiveness and ease of implementation. In essence, attackers can use specialized equipment to monitor the power consumption patterns of a device while it’s performing cryptographic operations. By analyzing these patterns, hackers can infer the encryption keys used by the device, effectively cracking the code.
The problem is that many devices, from smartphones to laptops, are vulnerable to these attacks. This is because most modern devices rely on complex algorithms and computational processes to perform encryption, which can be exploited to reveal sensitive information.
Enter PoSyn, a novel logic synthesis framework designed to enhance cryptographic hardware’s resistance against power side-channel attacks. The approach focuses on optimizing the mapping of vulnerable RTL components to standard cells from a technology library, minimizing power leakage in the process.
By employing a cost function that integrates key characteristics from the RTL design and the standard cell library, PoSyn strategically modifies the mapping criteria during the conversion of RTL designs into standard cell netlists without altering the design functionality. In other words, it’s like creating a secure blueprint for your device’s internal workings, making it much harder for attackers to extract sensitive information.
The researchers evaluated PoSyn on various cryptographic hardware, including AES, RSA, PRESENT, and post-quantum cryptography algorithms like Saber and CRYSTALS-Kyber. The results were impressive: the success rates for Differential Power Analysis (DPA) and Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) attacks dropped significantly, as low as 3% and 6%, respectively.
TVLA analysis confirmed that the synthesized netlists exhibited negligible leakage, making it much harder for attackers to extract sensitive information. What’s more, PoSyn achieved notable reductions in area efficiency by up to 3.79 times compared to traditional countermeasures like masking and shuffling.
The implications are significant: with PoSyn, developers can now create secure cryptographic hardware that minimizes power side-channel attacks without sacrificing performance or area efficiency. It’s a major breakthrough for the field of cryptography, offering a new layer of protection against these increasingly sophisticated attacks.
Cite this article: “Shining Light on Power Side-Channel Attacks with PoSyn”, The Science Archive, 2025.
Power Side-Channel Attacks, Cryptographic Hardware, Logic Synthesis Framework, Posyn, Rtl Components, Standard Cells, Technology Library, Cost Function, Differential Power Analysis, Correlation Power Analysis.
