Paper 2014/332

How to Choose Interesting Points for Template Attacks?

Guangjun Fan, Yongbin Zhou, Hailong Zhang, and Dengguo Feng

Abstract

Template Attacks are widely accepted to be the most powerful side-channel attacks from an information theoretic point of view. For Template Attacks, several papers suggested an accepted guideline of choosing interesting points. The accepted guideline is that one should only choose one point as the interesting point per clock cycle. Up to now, many methods of choosing interesting points were introduced. However, it is still unclear that which method will lead to the best classification performance for Template Attacks. In this paper, we comprehensively compare the classification performance of Template Attacks when using different known methods of choosing interesting points. Evaluation results show that CPA based method and SOST based method will lead to the best classification performance. Moreover, we find that some of the methods of choosing interesting points are essentially equivalent. In additional, we give out a more reasonable proof about the accepted guideline of choosing interesting points for Template Attacks by presenting a new way of conducting Template Attacks.