DES and differential power analysis the “duplication” method

Abstract

Paul Kocher recently developped attacks based on the electric consumption of chips that perform cryptographic computations. Among those attacks, the “Differential Power Analysis” (DPA) is probably one of the most impressive and most difficult to avoid. In this paper, we present several ideas to resist this type of attack, and in particular we develop one of them which leads, interestingly, to rather precise mathematical analysis. Thus we show that it is possible to build an implementation that is provably DPA-resistant, in a “local” and restricted way (i.e. when – given a chip with a fixed key – the attacker only tries to detect predictable local deviations in the differentials of mean curves). We also briefly discuss some more general attacks, that are sometimes efficient whereas the “original” DPA fails. Many measures of consumption have been done on real chips to test the ideas presented in this paper, and some of the obtained curves are printed here.