Side-channel attacks have empowered bypassing of cryptographic components in circuits. Power side-channel (PSC) attacks have received particular traction, owing to their non-invasiveness and proven effectiveness. Aside from prior art focused on conventional technologies, this is the first work to investigate the emerging Negative Capacitance Transistor (NCFET) technology in the context of PSC attacks. We implement a CAD flow for PSC evaluation at design-time. It leverages industry-standard design tools, while also employing the widely-accepted correlation power analysis (CPA) attack. Using standard-cell libraries based on the 7nm FinFET technology for NCFET and its counterpart CMOS setup, our evaluation reveals that NCFET-based circuits are more resilient to the classical CPA attack, due to the considerable effect of negative capacitance on the switching power. We also demonstrate that the thicker the ferroelectric layer, the higher the resiliency of the NCFET-based circuit, which opens new doors for optimization and trade-offs.

中文翻译：

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负电容晶体管 (NCFET) 中的电源侧通道攻击

旁道攻击使绕过电路中的加密组件成为可能。电源侧信道 (PSC) 攻击因其非侵入性和经证实的有效性而受到特别关注。除了专注于传统技术的现有技术之外，这是在 PSC 攻击的背景下研究新兴负电容晶体管 (NCFET) 技术的第一项工作。我们在设计时实现了用于 PSC 评估的 CAD 流程。它利用了行业标准的设计工具，同时还采用了广泛接受的相关功率分析 (CPA) 攻击。使用基于 7nm FinFET 技术的标准单元库用于 NCFET 及其对应的 CMOS 设置，我们的评估表明基于 NCFET 的电路对经典 CPA 攻击更具弹性，由于负电容对开关电源的影响相当大。我们还证明，铁电层越厚，基于 NCFET 的电路的弹性就越高，这为优化和权衡打开了新的大门。