Security Evaluation of Cryptographic Modules against Side-Channel Attack using a Biased Data Set

ISO/IEC 17825 defines a methodology to evaluate the vulnerability of a cryptographic module against side-channel attacks. It calculates the correlation between internal data and power consumption or the electro-magnetic (EM) radiation of the module to assess the possibility of hidden information leakage thorough the physical power or EM signals. In order to improve the precision of the assessment, we introduced a biased data set to enhance the leakage signal. When the module is vulnerable to the attacks, our technique can reduce a number of power or EM waveforms required to detect the leakage by 10 times. This improvement was demonstrated through experiments using AES circuits implemented with side-channel attack countermeasures on ASIC chips.