Optimization of Pearson correlation coefficient calculation for DPA and comparison of different approaches

Abstract

Differential power analysis (DPA) is one of the most common side channel attacks. To perform this attack we need to calculate a large amount of correlation coefficients. This amount is even higher when attacking FPGAs or ASICs, for higher order attacks and especially for attacking DPA protected devices. This article explains different approaches to the calculation of correlations, describes our implementation of these approaches and presents a detailed comparison considering their performance and their properties for a practical usage.