Analysis of Vivado Implementation Strategies Regarding Side-Channel Leakage for FPGA-Based AES Implementations.

Dynamic restructuring of cryptographic implementations has been proposed as a viable countermeasure against power and electromagnetic-based Side Channel Attacks (SCA). These kinds of countermeasures involve shuffling between functionally identical but structurally different realizations (known as variants) of a cryptographic circuit using Partial Reconfiguration. Previous studies show that the overall resistance of this countermeasure relies on the strength of individual variants. In this work we explore the possibility to use AMD Xilinx Vivado’s implementation strategies to easily generate variants and evaluate their influence on the resistance of AES against SCA using various metrics. For different implementation strategies, we present leakage behavior for individual bits of the resulting AES realizations and also their impact on overall resistance against SCA.