The differential power analysis laboratory setup

We present a newly established differential power analysis laboratory at Department of Electronics and Multimedia Communications. Differential power analysis is nowadays a serious threat against all cryptographic systems - when attacker is able to reveal secret information from the power consumption of the device under attack. We demonstrate the differential power analysis attacks on the reference implementation of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) described in Silicon Labs application note as a practical example. We ported this design to the ADuC 834 microcontroller based on a standard 8051 core. We measured power traces using the Agilent DSO9404A 20 Gsps oscilloscope. Due to high level of clock jitter we used a power traces alignment algorithm. We found out that we need to acquire just 35 encryptions or use sampling rate 20 Msps to perform successful differential power analysis attack - revealing the secret 128-bit key which is stored in the internal Flash memory of the ADuC 834 microcontroller.