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Partition vs. Comparison Side-Channel Distinguishers: An Empirical Evaluation of Statistical Tests for Univariate Side-Channel Attacks against Two Unprotected CMOS Devices

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Information Security and Cryptology – ICISC 2008 (ICISC 2008)

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Abstract

Given a cryptographic device leaking side-channel information, different distinguishers can be considered to turn this information into a successful key recovery. Such proposals include e.g. Kocher’s original DPA, correlation and template attacks. A natural question is therefore to determine the most efficient approach. In the last years, various experiments have confirmed the effectiveness of side-channel attacks. Unfortunately, these attacks were generally conducted against different devices and using different distinguishers. Additionally, the public literature contains more proofs of concept (e.g. single experiments exhibiting a key recovery) than sound statistical evaluations using unified criteria. As a consequence, this paper proposes a fair experimental comparison of different statistical tests for side-channel attacks. This analysis allows us to revisit a number of known intuitions and to put forward new ones. It also provides a methodological contribution to the analysis of physically observable cryptography. Additionally, we suggest an informal classification of side-channel distinguishers that underlines the similarities between different attacks. We finally describe a new (but highly inspired from previous ones) statistical test to exploit side-channel leakages.

Work supported in part by the IAP Programme P6/26 BCRYPT of the Belgian State, by FWO projects G.0475.05 and G.0300.07, by the European Commission under grant agreement 216646 ECRYPT NoE phase II, and by K.U. Leuven-BOF.

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Standaert, FX., Gierlichs, B., Verbauwhede, I. (2009). Partition vs. Comparison Side-Channel Distinguishers: An Empirical Evaluation of Statistical Tests for Univariate Side-Channel Attacks against Two Unprotected CMOS Devices. In: Lee, P.J., Cheon, J.H. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology – ICISC 2008. ICISC 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5461. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00730-9_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00730-9_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00729-3

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