A novel correlation power analysis attack on PIC based AES-128 without access to crypto device

In most power analysis attack, power traces obtained from the cryptographic device are aligned using a crypto device based triggering signal. In reality, the attacker does not have the luxury of inserting a trigger in the encryption device source code. This paper aims to execute a CPA attack on an 8 bit PIC-microcontroller (μC) implementation of AES-128 encryption without a crypto μC-based triggering signal. To address the misalignment, a unique methodology that features the introduction of an intermediate μC coupled with a suitable alignment method is applied. The proposed method is able to extract each byte of the key of an AES-128 using 200 power traces with a correlation coefficient of 0.6225.