High-resolution phase-based waveform matching and its application to side-channel attacks

This paper presents an enhanced side-channel attack using a phase-based waveform matching technique. Conventionally, side-channel attacks such as Simple Power Analysis (SPA) and Differential Power Analysis (DPA) capture signal waveforms (e.g., power traces) with a trigger signal or a system clock, and use a statistical analysis of the waveforms to reduce noise and to retrieve secret information. However, the waveform data often includes displacement errors, and this degrades the accuracy of the statistical analysis. The use of a Phase-Only Correlation (POC) technique makes it possible to estimate the displacements between the signal waveforms with higher resolution than the sampling resolution. The accuracy of side-channel attacks can be enhanced using the POC-based matching method. Also, a popular DPA countermeasure of creating distorted waveforms with random delays can be defeated by our method. In this paper, we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method in comparison with conventional approaches of experimental DPA and Differential ElectroMagnetic Analysis (DEMA) against DES software and hardware implementations.