Secure implementation of cryptographic modules: Development of a standard evaluation environment for side channel attacks

The use of cryptographic modules is rapidly expanding throughout the world. Because of this, it is necessary to standardize a security evaluation scheme and to establish a public evaluation and validation program for these modules. Side channel attacks, which extract secret information from the cryptographic module by analyzing power consumption and electromagnetic radiation, are attracting a lot of attention. Research activity on such attacks has intensified recently. However, it is difficult to compare evaluation schemes proposed by different researchers because of differences in the experimental platform or environment. This makes it difficult for other researchers to repeat and verify the results. Therefore, we have developed cryptographic hardware boards and analysis software to serve as a common, uniform evaluation platform for side channel attacks. We have distributed this platform to government, industry, and academic research labs throughout the world in order to facilitate the development of an international standard.