Differential Power Attack on SM4 Block Cipher

This paper presents a practicable method of differential power attack on SM4 block cipher. We build the power acquisition platform based on SASEBO-G board. Through the platform, the encryption of SM4 algorithm is implemented in hardware and the power curves are obtained by the Agilent oscilloscope at the same time. The hamming weight of 8-bit output of S-box is selected as the power model to realize the DPA attack on MATLAB. Only 2000 power traces are needed to crack the sub-key byte in the first round of standard SM4 algorithm. The cost of DPA attack has been reduced more than 60% compared with the references which need at least 5000 power traces.