Towards Efficient Second-Order Power Analysis

Viable cryptosystem designs must address power analysis attacks, and masking is a commonly proposed technique for defending against these side-channel attacks. It is possible to overcome simple masking by using higher-order techniques, but apparently only at some cost in terms of generality, number of required samples from the device being attacked, and computational complexity. We make progress towards ascertaining the significance of these costs by exploring a couple of attacks that attempt to efficiently employ second-order techniques to overcome masking. In particular, we consider two variants of second-order differential power analysis: Zero-Offset 2DPA and FFT 2DPA.