Hilbert Transform Based Vertical Preprocessing for Side-Channel Analysis

Abstract

Evaluating the success rate of a side-channel attack in design phase is of great significance for the design of secure crypto device. The reason is evaluation in design phase can help find and fix security vulnerabilities early. Existing methods of success rate evaluation in design phase ignore the preprocessing of real attacks. This results in a big gap between the success rate evaluated in design phase and that got in practical attacks. In this paper we propose a Hilbert Transform based vertical preprocessing, aiming at enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio. Compared to existing preprocessing methods aiming at a similar purposes, it can be mounted in design phase, which makes it possible to refine evaluation in design phase. Furthermore, the Hilbert Transform based vertical preprocessing can be used in real attacks as well, and its working efficiency is higher than that of other advanced preprocessing. We perform the vertical preprocessing not only in simulated scenarios but also in practical scenarios. Evaluation results confirm that vertical preprocessing leads to significant improvement of success rate. Therefore, we note vertical preprocessing can be an important tool for evaluating and analyzing of the practical security of crypto device.