On the optimal pre-processing for non-profiling differential power analysis

Abstract

Differential Power Analysis (DPA) is often preceded by various noise reduction techniques. Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) have found their numerous applications in this area. However, most of them either require explicit profiling/semi-profiling step or depend on some heuristically chosen parameters. In this paper, we propose optimal pre-processing of power traces in non-profiling setup using an optimum linear filter and an approximate optimum linear filter. We have also empirically evaluated the proposed filters in several noisy scenarios which show significant improvements in the results of Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) over the existing pre-processing techniques. We have further investigated the optimality of the one proposed pre-processing technique by comparing it with a profiling attack. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.