FortifyIQ

By checking resistance of your device to side-channel attacks at the pre-silicon stage, you can potentially save — in tapeout, masks, and fab run — millions of dollars and several months in your product development process.

PowerIQ is a proprietary revolutionary software suite with built-in patented mathematical modeling for power consumption simulation that replaces the need to physically measure the actual device’s power consumption. PowerIQ simulates power consumption traces from a cryptographic hardware device based on a standard textual representation of the device’s circuitry. The traces are subsequently used by the TraceIQ tool to assess resistance to side-channel attacks.

It is much faster and less expensive to use PowerIQ in the pre-silicon stage than to use an oscilloscope to obtain power consumption traces from the actual physical device after it is built.

In order to find out whether your device is vulnerable to side-channel attacks, we analyze its power consumption traces, and (in the case the device is vulnerable) we find the source of the information leakage, so you can fix it at the pre-silicon stage and repeat this development cycle until the design is not vulnerable anymore.

TraceIQ analyzes traces (either simulated traces produced by PowerIQ or traces measured on the actual device) and attempts to extract the secret key using various mathematical methods of trace analysis. In the case that TraceIQ succeeds to extract the key (which means that the device is vulnerable), it is possible to receive information about the leakage source, e.g. types and specific instances of leaky cells, exact timing of the leakage etc. In particular, TraceIQ can detect leakage caused by transient state transitions of gates in the middle of clock cycles (“glitches”).