A Comparative Study of Power Consumption Models for CPA Attack

Power analysis attacks are types of side channel attacks that are based on analyzing the power consumption of the cryptographic devices. Correlation power analysis is a powerful and efficient cryptanalytic technique. It exploits the linear relation between the predicted power consumption and the real power consumption of cryptographic devices in order to recover the correct key. The predicted power consumption is determined by using the appropriate consumption model. Until now, only a few models have been proposed and used.In this paper, we describe the process to conduct the CPA attack against AES on SASEBO-GII board. We present a comparison between the Hamming Distance model and the Switching Distance model, in terms of number of power traces needed to recover the correct key using these models. The global successful rate achieves 100% at 11100 power traces. The power traces needed to recover the correct key have been decreased by 12.6% using a CPA attack with Switching Distance model.