Template Attacks of a Masked S-Box Circuit: A Comparison Between Static and Dynamic Power Analyses

Static-power-based side-channel attacks have developed rapidly in the past few years. Many classical side channel attack algorithms have been adapted to exploit static power consumption. There have been successful applications of side-channel attacks based on static power dissipation of cryptographic circuits designed in different technology sizes. In this paper we perform template attacks on a masked s-box circuit designed and simulated using 45-nm CMOS standard cell library. We are the first to compare template attacks using static power and dynamic power in the context of masked s-box implementations. We are able to achieve successful results using both types of power leakage. However, we observe that, in the 45-nm environment, dynamic power analysis requires a high sampling rate for the oscilloscopes used to collect data, while the results of static power analysis are more sensitive to additive noise.