Paper 2005/338

An Improved Power Analysis Attack Against Camellia's Key Schedule

Lu Xiao and Howard M. Heys

Abstract

This paper presents an improved simple power analysis attack against the key schedule of Camellia. While the original attack required an exact determination of the Hamming weight of intermediate data values based on power measurements, in this paper, two variants of the simple power analysis attack are presented and shown to be tolerant of errors that might occur in the Hamming weight determinations. In practical applications of the attack such errors are likely to occur due to noise and distortion in the power measurements and their mapping to the Hamming weights of the data. Further, we propose a practical method to evaluate the susceptibility of other block ciphers to simple power analysis attacks. To resist these attacks, the required design rationale of key schedules and several practical countermeasures are suggested.