Power Amount Analysis: An efficient Means to Reveal the Secrets in Cryptosystems

In this paper we propose a novel approach to reveal the information leakage of cryptosystems by means of a side-channel analysis of their power consumption. We therefore introduce first a novel power trace model based on communication theory to better understand and to efficiently exploit power traces in side-channel attacks. Then, we discuss a dedicated attack method denoted as Power Amount Analysis, which takes more time points into consideration compared to many other attack methods. We use the well-known Correlation Power Analysis method as the reference in order to demonstrate the figures of merit of the advocated analysis method. Then we perform a comparison of these analysis methods at identical attack conditions in terms of run time, traces usage, misalignment tolerance, and internal clock frequency effects. The resulting advantages of the novel analysis method are demonstrated by mounting both mentioned attack methods for an FPGA-based AES-128 encryption module.