Partition vs. comparison side-channel distinguishers: an empirical evaluation of statistical tests for univariate side-channel attacks against two unprotected CMOS devices

Standaert, François-Xavier;Gierlichs, B.;Verbauwhede, I.
(2009) Information Security and Cryptology - ICISC 2008. 11th International Conference — Location: Seoul, South Korea (3.December.2008)

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Given a cryptographic device leaking side-channel information, different distinguishers can be considered to turn this information into a successful key recovery. Such proposals include e.g. Kocher's original DPA, correlation and template attacks. A natural question is therefore to determine the most efficient approach. In the last years, various experiments have confirmed the effectiveness of side-channel attacks. Unfortunately, these attacks were generally conducted against different devices and using different distinguishers. Additionally, the public literature contains more proofs of concept (e.g. single experiments exhibiting a key recovery) than sound statistical evaluations using unified criteria. As a consequence, this paper proposes a fair experimental comparison of different statistical tests for side-channel attacks. This analysis allows us to revisit a number of known intuitions and to put forward new ones. It also provides a methodological contribution to the analysis of physically observable cryptography. Additionally, we suggest an informal classification of side-channel distinguishers that underlines the similarities between different attacks. We finally describe a new (but highly inspired from previous ones) statistical test to exploit side-channel leakages.
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Standaert, F.-X., Gierlichs, B., & Verbauwhede, I. (2009). Partition vs. comparison side-channel distinguishers: an empirical evaluation of statistical tests for univariate side-channel attacks against two unprotected CMOS devices. In Pil Joong Lee; Jung Hee Cheon; (ed.), Information Security and Cryptology - ICISC 2008. 11th International Conference (p. p. 253-267). Springer-verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00730-9_16