Evaluation of side-channel leakage simulation by using EMC macro-model of cryptographic devices

Side-channel (SC) leakage from a cryptographic device chip is simulated as the dynamic current flowing out of the chip. When evaluating the simulated current, an evaluation by comparison with an actual measurement is essential; however, it is difficult to compare them directly. This is because a measured waveform is typically the output voltage of probe placed at the observation position outside the chip, and the actual dynamic current is modified by several transfer impedances. Therefore, in this paper, the probe voltage is converted into the dynamic current by using an EMC macro-model of a cryptographic device being evaluated. This paper shows that both the amplitude and the SC analysis (correlation power analysis and measurements to disclosure) results of the simulated dynamic current were evaluated appropriately by using the EMC macro-model. An evaluation confirms that the shape of the simulated current matches the measured one; moreover, the SC analysis results agreed with the measured ones well. On the basis of the results, it is confirmed that a register-transfer level (RTL) simulation of the dynamic current gives a reasonable estimation of SC traces.