A Highly Effective Data Preprocessing in Side-Channel Attack Using Empirical Mode Decomposition

Abstract

Side-channel attacks on cryptographic chips in embedded systems have been attracting considerable interest from the field of information security in recent years. Many research studies have contributed to improve the side-channel attack efficiency, in which most of the works assume the noise of the encryption signal has a linear stable Gaussian distribution. However, their performances of noise reduction were moderate. Thus, in this paper, we describe a highly effective data-preprocessing technique for noise reduction based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and demonstrate its application for a side-channel attack. EMD is a time-frequency analysis method for nonlinear unstable signal processing, which requires no prior knowledge about the cryptographic chip. During the procedure of data preprocessing, the collected traces will be self-adaptably decomposed into sum of several intrinsic mode functions (IMF) based on their own characteristics. And then, meaningful IMF will be reorganized to reduce its noise and increase the efficiency of key recovering through correlation power analysis attack. This technique decreases the total number of traces for key recovering by 17.7%, compared to traditional attack methods, which is verified by attack efficiency analysis of the SM4 block cipher algorithm on the FPGA power consumption analysis platform.