A CPA attack against cryptographic hardware implementation on SASEBO-GII

Abstract

Cryptographic circuits are used in electronic devices to protect the confidential data. Those circuits store the encryption key to use in the cryptographic algorithms as the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm (AES). The Correlation Power Analysis attack (CPA) is powerful cryptanalysis techniques that based on exploiting a linear relation between the real and predicted cryptographic circuits' power consumption. In this paper, we explain the CPA attack process against AES implemented on SASEBO-GII FPGA platform. The experimental results demonstrate that the CPA attack based on Hamming Weight power consumption model cannot extract the correct AES keys. However, the CPA based on Hamming Distance power consumption model can extract successfully all the encryption key bytes. In addition, the CPA attacks results show that using Hamming Distance, 100% of encryption key appears at about 4300 power traces.