AES Key Recovery Based on Switching Distance Model

As one of the effective side-channel attacks that threaten the security of cryptographic devices, Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) attacks exploit the linear relation between the known power consumption and the predicted power consumption of cryptographic devices to recover keys. A robust cryptographic algorithm should endure both the cryptanalysis from software and hardware implementations. Researches have focused on the security examination of AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). In this paper, we present the CPA attack with the Switching Distance model against an AES implementation on ASIC. Compared with the leakage model of Hamming Distance, the power traces of recovering keys have been decreased by as much as 25%. These should cause more attention of security experts.