Differential power analysis: Attacks and resisting techniques

Abstract

Differential Power Analysis (DPA) is a statistical approach to analyze the power consumption of a cryptographic system to break its security infrastructure. It has challenged the vulnerability of most of the cryptographic techniques like DES, AES, RSA etc. With DPA, attackers passively collect the power traces of the system and then make a comparative analysis with some hypothetical power traces. The analysis result having high value reveals the secret key used. This kind of attack has been explored by many researchers and has proposed techniques to make such attacks highly efficient. In this paper we present a detail on DPA along with the models and types for such attack. We also present some of the recent attack techniques as well as countermeasures on DPA.