Improving the Rules of the DPA Contest
François‐Xavier Standaert, Philippe Bulens, Giacomo de Meulenaer, Nicolas Veyrat-Charvillon · IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive · 2008
A DPA contest has been launched at CHES 2008. The goal of this initiative is to make it possible for researchers to compare different side-channel attacks in an objective manner. For this purpose, a set of 80 000 traces corresponding to the encryption of 80 000 different plain- texts with the Data Encryption Standard and a fixed key has been made available. In this short note, we discuss the rules that the contest uses to rate the effectiveness of different distinguishers. We first describe prac- tical examples of attacks in which these rules can be misleading. Then, we suggest an improved set of rules that can be implemented easily in order to obtain a better interpretation of the comparisons performed.