Abstract
This paper discusses a case study application, cryptography, to which asynchronous circuits are often applied. The basis for using asynchronous circuits in cryptographic applications is to avoid the leakage of information that enables using side channel attacks (SCAs), like Differential Electromagnetic Analysis and Differential Power Analysis, to break the secret key. Due to the weaknesses demonstrated in purely asynchronous styles, this work proposes a new approach to build cryptographic circuits, using an association of the Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) design style, pipelining and random frequencies. The overall idea is that randomizing how information is encrypted may make SCAs much more difficult. Experimental results conducting attacks with a large set of captured traces on synchronous, asynchronous and GALS pipeline architectures demonstrate superiority of the proposed approach in terms of robustness, throughput and area overhead.