Performance Enhancement of Differential Power Analysis Attacks With Signal Companding Methods

Among previous proposed side channel analysis (SCA) methods, differential power analysis (DPA) based on the statistical characteristics of collected signals has been known as an efficient attack for uncovering the secret key of cryptosystems. However, the attack performance of this method is affected very much by the temporal misalignment and noise of collected side channel signals. In this letter, we propose a new method to surmount the noise problem in DPA. The performance of the proposed method is then evaluated while analyzing the power consumption signals of microcontroller chip during a DES operation. When we compare the experimental results with respect to the needed number of traces to uncover the secret key, our proposed method shows a performance enhancement of 33% in the time domain and 50% in the frequency domain without a time burden.