Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2009/161

Built-in Determined Sub-key Correlation Power Analysis

Yuichi Komano and Hideo Shimizu and Shinichi Kawamura

Abstract: Correlation power analysis (CPA) is a well-known attack against cryptographic modules with which an attacker evaluates the correlation between the power consumption and the sensitive data candidate calculated from a guessed sub-key and known data (plaintext or ciphertext). This paper enhances CPA to propose a new general power analysis, \textit{build-in determined sub-key CPA} (BS-CPA), that finds a new sub-key by using the previously determined sub-keys recursively to compute the sensitive data candidate and to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in its analysis. BS-CPA is powerful and effective when the multiple sbox outputs (or corresponding data) are processed simultaneously as in the hardware implementation. We apply BS-CPA to the power consumption traces provided at the DPA contest and succeed in finding DES key less than the original CPA does.

Category / Keywords: implementation / Side channel attacks, Power analysis, CPA, Hamming weight and Hamming distance models, DPA contest, DES

Date: received 6 Apr 2009, last revised 3 Aug 2009

Contact author: yuichi1 komano at toshiba co jp

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Version: 20090803:071855 (All versions of this report)

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