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Towards a Better Understanding of Side-Channel Analysis Measurements Setups

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Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications (CARDIS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 13173))

Abstract

The evaluation of side-channel measurement setups and the impact they can have on physical security evaluations is a surprisingly under-discussed topic. In this paper, we initiate a comprehensive study of such setups for embedded software and hardware (FPGA) implementations. We systematically investigate a design space including the choice of the probing method, the clock frequency of the device under test, its supply voltage and the sampling rate of the adversary’s oscilloscope. Our results quantify the impact (i.e., the risk of security over-estimations) that suboptimal setups can cause and lead to easy-to-use guidelines for security evaluators. Despite some of our conclusions are device-dependent, we argue that the proposed methodology and some of the proposed guidelines are of general interest and could be applied to other setups.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The availability of a good trigger may raise additional challenges [4].

  2. 2.

    The on-board Sakura amplifier was not used for consistency with the software setup.

  3. 3.

    The experiments where the \(\log _{10}\mathsf {PI}\) is -inf correspond to a negative PI, indicating the no information could be extracted from the estimated model.

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Acknowledgments

François-Xavier Standaert is a senior research associate of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS). This work has been funded in parts by the European Union through the ERC project SWORD (724725).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UCLouvain, ICTEAM/ELEN/Crypto Group, Belgium, UK

    Davide Bellizia, Balazs Udvarhelyi & François-Xavier Standaert

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  1. Davide Bellizia
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  2. Balazs Udvarhelyi
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  3. François-Xavier Standaert
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Correspondence to Balazs Udvarhelyi .

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  1. Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne, France

    Vincent Grosso

  2. Infineon Technologies, Neubiberg, Germany

    Thomas Pöppelmann

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Bellizia, D., Udvarhelyi, B., Standaert, FX. (2022). Towards a Better Understanding of Side-Channel Analysis Measurements Setups. In: Grosso, V., Pöppelmann, T. (eds) Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications. CARDIS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97348-3_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97348-3_4

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