Improving the Rules of the DPA Contest

Francois-Xavier Standaert; Philippe Bulens; Giacomo de Meulenaer; Nicolas Veyrat-Charvillon

Paper 2008/517

Improving the Rules of the DPA Contest

Francois-Xavier Standaert, Philippe Bulens, Giacomo de Meulenaer, and Nicolas Veyrat-Charvillon

Abstract

A DPA contest has been launched at CHES 2008. The goal of this initiative is to make it possible for researchers to compare different side-channel attacks in an objective manner. For this purpose, a set of 80000 traces corresponding to the encryption of 80000 different plaintexts with the Data Encryption Standard and a fixed key has been made available. In this short note, we discuss the rules that the contest uses to rate the effectiveness of different distinguishers. We first describe practical examples of attacks in which these rules can be misleading. Then, we suggest an improved set of rules that can be implemented easily in order to obtain a better interpretation of the comparisons performed.

Note: More details are available on: http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/~fstandae/tsca/

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF PS
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Contact author(s): fstandae @ uclouvain be
History: 2008-12-09: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2008/517
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2008/517,
      author = {Francois-Xavier Standaert and Philippe Bulens and Giacomo de Meulenaer and Nicolas Veyrat-Charvillon},
      title = {Improving the Rules of the {DPA} Contest},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2008/517},
      year = {2008},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2008/517}
}