Efficient DPA Attacks on AES Hardware Implementations

Yu HAN, Xuecheng ZOU, Zhenglin LIU, Yicheng CHEN

Department of Electronic Science & Technology, Huazhong University of Science & Technology, Wuhan, P.R.China.

DOI: 10.4236/ijcns.2008.11010                

Abstract

This paper presents an effective way to enhance power analysis attacks on AES hardware implementations. The proposed attack adopts hamming difference of intermediate results as power mode. It arranges plaintext inputs to differentiate power traces to the maximal probability. A simulation-based AES ASIC implementation and experimental platform are built. Various power attacks are conducted on our AES hardware implementation. Unlike on software implementations, conventional power attacks on hardware implementations may not succeed or require more computations. However, the method we proposed effectively improves the success rate using acceptable number of power traces and fewer computations. Furthermore from experimental data, the correlation factor between the hamming distance of key guesses and the difference of DPA traces has the value 0.9233 to validate power model and attack results.

Keywords

Security, AES, Differential Power Analysis (DPA), Power Model, Correlation Factor

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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