A Novel Analysis Method for Assessing the Side-Channel Resistance of Cryptosystems

Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) is an efficient method to reveal the key of a physical cryptosystem in practice. At a first glance, the Power Amount Analysis (PAA) may be seen as just a variant of the CPA method, but PAA relies on a completely different understanding of the noise in power traces. The latter exploits a large number of time points in the captured power traces to determine their contribution to the information leakage. It features a faster calculation, less traces usage, and stronger misalignment tolerance compared to a CPA-based attack. In order to further strengthen such an attack, in this paper we propose a framework to consider the injection of the Hamming distance power model into the captured power traces by exploiting the least squares estimation and to combine it with the PAA method. The application example shows that an integration of this attack method and the mentioned power model features good analysis results yielding a considerable performance improvement of the original PAA approach.