A new efficient interesting points enhanced electromagnetic attack on AT89S52

Abstract

Electromagnetic attacks are non-invasive attacks and pose serious threats to the security of cryptographic devices. However, its environment is complex and the noise on electromagnetic traces is often large. Thus, traditional differential electromagnetic analysis (DEMA) and correlation electromagnetic analysis (CEMA) require a lot of electromagnetic traces to recover the key used in the cryptographic devices. In order to reduce the number of electromagnetic traces required in our attacks, two high efficiency side channel distinguishers named multiple interesting points combined differential electromagnetic analysis (MIP-DEMA) and multiple interesting points combined correlation electromagnetic analysis (MIP-CEMA) are proposed in this paper. Experimental results on AES algorithm targeting an AT89S52 microcontroller show that, to get success rates of 0.80 and 1.00, only 40% ~ 60% of electromagnetic traces are needed in our MIP-DEMA and MIP-CEMA.