A fair experimental evaluation of distance correlation side-channel distinguisher

Side-channel attacks pose a severe threat to cryptographic implementations, allowing the attacker to recover secret information based on physical observations of the cryptographic device. Correlation Power Analysis is considered to be one of the most powerful attacks in the non-profiled scenario. In this paper, we consider the distance/Brownian correlation instead of the traditionally used Pearson coefficient. We give a fair comparison of our novel approach attacking AES on three different FPGA platforms and we discuss the distance correlation potential in the context of side-channel analysis.