Digital LDO Based Power Signature Generation Circuit for IoT Security

Power analysis or power fingerprinting has been demonstrated as a potent tool to detect malicious operation or adversary attacks. However, current methods to extract power traces for power analysis typically require bulky and power hungry equipment, which prevents integrating power analysis methods in IoT devices. This work presents a novel method to extract the power signature of IoT devices. The proposed method takes advantage of the digital control signals of digital LDO circuits and generates the power signature with simple circuits. The proposed circuit can be embedded into LDO circuits and hence is suitable for IoT applications. The proposed circuit is designed using a 130 nm CMOS technology and its performance is evaluated via simulation with real sensor power trace data.