Side-channel Signal Research Articles

Performance Enhancement of Differential Power Analysis Attacks With Signal Companding Methods

Among previous proposed side channel analysis (SCA) methods, differential power analysis (DPA) based on the statistical characteristics of collected signals has been known as an efficient attack for uncovering the secret key of cryptosystems. However, the attack performance of this method is affected very much by the temporal misalignment and noise of collected side channel signals. In this letter, we propose a new method to surmount the noise problem in DPA. The performance of the proposed method is then evaluated while analyzing the power consumption signals of microcontroller chip during a DES operation. When we compare the experimental results with respect to the needed number of traces to uncover the secret key, our proposed method shows a performance enhancement of 33% in the time domain and 50% in the frequency domain without a time burden.

Noise Reduction in Side Channel Attack Using Fourth-Order Cumulant

Side channel attacks exploit physical information leaked during the operation of a cryptographic device (e.g., a smart card). The confidential data, which can be leaked from side channels, are timing of operations, power consumption, and electromagnetic emanation. In this paper, we propose a preprocessing method based on the fourth-order cumulant, which aims to improve the performance of side channel attacks. It takes advantages of the Gaussian and nonGaussian properties, that respectively characterize the noise and the signal, to remove the effects due to Gaussian noise coupled into side channel signals. The proposed method is then applied to analyze the electromagnetic signals of a synthesized application-specific integrated circuit during a data encryption standard operation. The theoretical and experimental results show that our method significantly reduces the number of side channel signals needed to detect the encryption key.