Differential capacitance analysis

Abstract

This paper proposes a new kind of side-channel attack where the correlation between processed data and total capacitance seen looking into the power supply pin of a cryptographic device is exploited. The attack is introduced and advantages and drawbacks with respect to the well-known power analysis are discussed. The attack implementation and experimental results attacking a static CMOS implementation of a 8051 microprocessor core are provided and a comparison between the proposed technique and power analysis is carried out. The obtained results are promising and future activities are planned to assess the performance of this new side-channel analysis when attacking secure implementations. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.