Improved Power Analysis Attack Based on the Preprocessed Power Traces

Abstract

In recent years, side-channel attacks have become a most powerful attack performed on cryptographic devices. And many side-channel attack methods have sprung up, such as time attacks, electromagnetic radiation attacks, power analysis attacks including simple power attack, differential power attack, correlation power attack, etc. And the correlation power attack has become the most common side-channel attack. In this paper, we introduce a method to improve the correlation power attack (CPA). Our method is mainly to preprocess the recorded power consumption of a cryptographic device. During the procedure, we introduce a four-dimension vector to express the basic unit which we deal with. And also we give the steps of performing our improved CPA (named as ICPA). Then the experiment shows that the ICPA method enhances the efficiency. Meanwhile, we briefly show that preprocessing power traces increases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) comparing with non-preprocessed power traces.