Influence of Parallelism in Vector-Multiplication Units on Correlation Power Analysis

Jan 9, 2026 by Manuel Brosch, M. Probst, Stefan Koegler, Georg Sigl (ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems)

DOI 10.1145/3795524

We studied how cranking up parallelism in vector-multiply units changes the power fingerprint attackers use for Correlation Power Analysis, derived analytic equations predicting how CPA correlation drops with more simultaneous MACs, and validated them on an FPGA showing the theoretical CPA limit at 15 PEs collapses to about 8 PEs in practice due to noise and SNR decay. This gives a simple, hardware-aware rule-of-thumb for accelerator designers to trade parallelism against side-channel vulnerability without diving into the attack stack.

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