Differential Power Analysis of Advanced Encryption Standard on accelerated 8051 processor

Abstract

This paper presents implementation details of Differential Power Analysis (DPA) attack on accelerated 8051-based microcontroller with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. It also mentions differences between accelerated and regular 8051 cores from DPA point of view. DPA attack is performed on the devices by measuring their instantaneous power consumption during AES encipher process. Correlation analysis of precomputed and measured data can reveal secret key used by AES algorithm. Modification of measurement process and statistical evaluation algorithms improves results of the attack. Main results of this paper are working DPA attacks on accelerated 8051-based microcontroller, differences in power consumption models between common and accelerated 8051 cores, comparison of different measure points, methods for finding power model consumption, automated measurement of the traces and improved algorithm of correlation analysis. These results can be used to protect future implementations against DPA attacks.