Abstract:

Test vector leakage assessment (TVLA) is prone to “false negative” when the power consumption sample size is small.To address this issue, it was found that for non-specific TVLA, when the power consumption sample size changes, the test statistic t-values obtained at the leakage sampling points in the power trace vary accordingly, while the t-values at the non-leakage sampling points do not significantly vary.Therefore, when there is leakage, the distributions of the t-values obtained under different sample sizes will be different.Based on this, it was proposed to implement non-specific TVLA under different sample sizes and perform two-sample KS test on the obtained t-value sequences to evaluate whether there was leakage.Verifications were carried out based on unprotected-aligned simulation power consumption, protected-aligned power consumption dataset DPA Contest v4_2 and protected-non-aligned self-collected power consumption respectively.The results showed that the sample size required by the proposed method on the aligned simulation power consumption and DPA Contest v4_2 was reduced by at most 46.1% and 39.0% respectively.And after the alignment, the required sample size of the proposed method on the self-collected power consumption is also smaller than that of other schemes, with a maximum reduction of 29.4%.Therefore, the proposed method can effectively reduce the probability of “false negative” when the power consumption sample size is small.

Key words: side-channel, test vector leakage assessment, false negative, two-sample KS test