Efficient Nonprofiling 2nd-Order Power Analysis on Masked Devices Utilizing Multiple Leakage Points
Liwei Zhang, Aidong Adam Ding, Yunsi Fei, Pei Luo · IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing · 2017
2nd-order attacks utilize power values at two leakage points to break cryptographic systems protected by 1st-order random masking. Without profiling, the attacker do not know the exact location of the two leakage points. Standard 2nd-order attacks with an exhaustive search over two windows of size nw has computational complexity O(nw2) and does not scale well with the window size nw. We propose to apply a decision-combination attack, the majority vote (MV) attack, to combine 2nd order attacks at multiple candidate pairs of leakage points selected through two filters. The first filter pre-process the power traces with Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) techniques and reduce the complexity to O(nwlog2(nw)). The second filter use an advanced statistical feature selection procedure, Higher Criticism (HC), to select leakage candidates that improve the effectiveness of decision-combination MV attack and other leakage-combination attacks. We derive theoretical success conditions of MV attacks as well as the typical maximum attack and a leakage-combination sum attack. The theoretical conditions are confirmed through performance comparisons of the attacks on synthetic data sets and on two real data sets, an FPGA implementation and a software implementation of masked AES. The proposed FF-HC-MV attack is data-adaptive, working well in all data sets.