Design of secure cryptography against the threat of power-attacks in DSP-embedded processors

Embedded wireless devices require secure high-performance cryptography in addition to low-cost and low-energy dissipation. This paper presents for the first time a design methodology for security on a VLIW complex DSP-embedded processor core. Elliptic curve cryptography is used to demonstrate the design for security methodology. Results are verified with real dynamic power measurements and show that compared to previous research a 79% improvement in performance is achieved. Modification of power traces are performed to resist simple power analysis attack with up to 39% overhead in performance, up to 49% overheads in energy dissipation, and up to 11% overhead in code size. Simple power analysis on the VLIW DSP core is shown to be more correlated to routine ordering than individual instructions. For the first time, differential power analysis results on a VLIW using real power measurements are presented. Results show that the processor instruction level parallelism and large bus size contribute in making differential power analysis attacks extremely difficult. This research is important for industry since efficient yet secure cryptography is crucial for wireless communication devices.