Quantitative Evaluation of Side-Channel Security

There have been enormous research efforts dedicated to new countermeasures against side-channel attacks. However, very few reports were published about how to quantitatively verify their effectiveness. This paper presents statistical approaches of quantitative evaluation in respect of time disarrangement and side-channel magnitude confusion. The statistical mean value of the cross correlation coefficients measures the effectiveness of time disarrangement. The difference between the highest two correlation factors out of the key guesses is assessed to evaluate the effectiveness of side-channel magnitude confusion. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed evaluation approaches are accurate and feasible. Eliminating requirement of reference makes the evaluations applicable in objective assessment of various devices by any designers or evaluators.