Enhancing non-profiled side-channel attacks by time-frequency analysis

Abstract

Side-channel analysis (SCA) has become an increasing important method to assess the physical security of cryptographic systems. In the process of SCA, the number of attack data directly determines the performance of SCA. With sufficient attack data, the adversary can achieve a successful SCA. However, in reality, the cryptographic device may be protected with some countermeasures to limit the number of encryptions using the same key. In this case, the adversary cannot use casual numbers of data to perform SCA. The performance of SCA will be severely dropped if the attack traces are insufficient. In this paper, we introduce wavelet scatter transform (WST) and short-time fourier transform (STFT) to non-profiled side-channel analysis domains, to improve the performance of side-channel attacks in the context of insufficient data. We design a practical framework to provide suitable parameters for WST/STFT-based SCA. Using the proposed method, the WST/STFT-based SCA method can significantly enhance the performance and robustness of non-profiled SCA. The practical attacks against four public datasets show that the proposed method is able to achieve more robust performance. Compared with the original correlation power analysis (CPA), the number of attack data can be reduced by 50–95%.