A practical approach to differential power analysis using PIC micrcontroller based embedded system

Differential power analysis attacks are a major concern to the embedded systems security designers. The attacks can be successful even without knowing much information about the system. The attacks process is initiated by measuring the power consumption of the device followed by establishing a hypothetical power consumption then comparing it with the measured power consumption to extractthe secret information contained in a chip or system. This paper provides the practical realization of such attacks on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) implemented on a PIC based system. This includes the experimental setup used for power measurements and the implementation of AES algorithm. The captured power traces are further analyzed in Matlab to reveal the secret key information.