Towards Efficient Alignment for Electromagnetic Side Channel Attacks

Side Channel Attacks (SCAs) reveal secret information from cryptographic algorithms implemented on embedded systems by exploiting its physical leakages. In order to defeat SCAs, hiding is one of the methods used as a protection against such attacks. The idea of hiding is to obtain a non-predictable offset of the attacking point in terms of time dimension. In order to cancel/defeat such countermeasure, the measured leakages are often desired to be well aligned. Pre-processing techniques are widely used to increase the success of the attack. This work investigates previous methods of alignment techniques used for electromagnetic traces. In addition to the comparison between them, we also propose combining filtering by wavelets with envelope detectors in order to improve the success rate of the elastic alignment technique which depends on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm.