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How to Characterize Side-Channel Leakages More Accurately?

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Information Security Practice and Experience (ISPEC 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 6672))

Abstract

The effectiveness of side-channel attacks strongly depends on to what extent the underlying leakage model characterizes the physical leakages of cryptographic implementations and on how largely the subsequent distinguisher exploits these leakages. Motivated by this, we propose a compact yet efficient approach to more accurately characterizing side-channel leakages. It is called Bitwise Weighted Characterization (BWC) approach. We use power analysis attacks as illustrative examples and construct two new BWC-based side-channel distinguishers, namely BWC-DPA and BWC-CPA. We present a comparative study of several distinguishers applied to both simulated power traces and real power measurements from an AES microcontroller prototype implementation to demonstrate the validity and the effectiveness of the proposed methods. For example, the number of traces required to perform successful BWC-CPA (resp. BWC-DPA) is only 66% (resp. 49%) of that of CPA (resp. DPA). Our results firmly validate the power and the accuracy of the proposed side-channel leakages characterization approach.

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Liu, J., Zhou, Y., Han, Y., Li, J., Yang, S., Feng, D. (2011). How to Characterize Side-Channel Leakages More Accurately?. In: Bao, F., Weng, J. (eds) Information Security Practice and Experience. ISPEC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6672. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21031-0_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21031-0_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21030-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21031-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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