Side-Channel Leakage Detection Based on Constant Parameter Channel Model

Side-channel analysis (SCA) becomes a serious realistic threat to crypto devices, it is thus imperative to evaluate the resistance of a device to SCA. Side-channel leakage detection aiming to identify the leakage points potentially revealing secrets in side channel signals, is considered as a preliminary step before further security assessment. This work proposes a novel black-box leakage detection approach, which views the side channel as a constant parameter communication channel when it outputs leakage points. The approach distinguishes leakage points by utilizing the kurtosis-based consistency check for channel parameter estimators. To examine the efficiency of this approach, false negative and false positive rates were first quantitatively analyzed by comprehensive experiments. Considering the fact that side-channel leakage can be from multiple channels in practice, we further investigated the applicability of the proposed approach to multi-channel leakage detection. Interestingly, equipped with the proposed detection approach, we correspondingly devised a novel side-channel attack exploiting a kurtosis-based distinguisher. Overall, extensive experiments have validated the efficiencies of our proposed leakage detection method and the novel SCA attack.