Side-Channel Leakage through Static Power Should We Care about in Practice?

By shrinking the technology static power consumption of CMOS circuits is becoming a major concern. In this paper, we present the first practical results of exploiting static power consumption of FPGA-based cryptographic devices in order to mount a key-recovery side-channel attack. The experiments represented here are based on three Xilinx FPGAs built on 65 nm, 45 nm, and 28 nm process technologies. By means of a sophisticated measurement setup and methodology we demonstrate an exploitable information leakage through static power of the underlying FPGAs. The current work highlights the feasibility of side-channel analysis attacks by static power that have been known for years but have not been performed and investigated in practice yet. This is a starting point for further research investigations, and may have a significant impact on the efficiency of DPA countermeasures in the near future.