Efficient Framework for Genetic Algorithm-Based Correlation Power Analysis

Various Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are combined with classic side-channel methods to improve the efficiency of attacks. Among them, Genetic-Algorithms-based Correlation Power Analysis (GA-CPA) is proposed to launch attacks on hardware cryptosystems to extract the secret key efficiently. However, the convergence efficiency of GA-CPA is unsatisfactory due to two problems: the randomly generated initial population generally have low fitness, and the mutation operation in each iteration hardly produces high-quality individuals because of the confusion and diffusion characteristics of S-boxes. In this paper, we propose an analysis framework of GA-CPA which focuses on solving these two problems. First, we explore the list of candidate key bytes which is the result of Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) on a limited number of power traces, so that the population can be initialized with high quality candidates. Second, we improve the mutation operation by guiding the candidate key to mutate in a higher-fitness direction instead of randomly. Third, we make full use of the fitness calculation method and combine it with key enumeration algorithms to further improve the efficiency of key recovery. Simulation experimental results show that our method reduces the number of traces by 33.3% and 43.9% compared to CPA with key enumeration and GA-CPA respectively when the success rate is fixed to 90%. Real experiments performed on SAKURA-G confirm that the number of traces required in our method is much less than the numbers of traces required in CPA and GA-CPA. Besides, we adjust our method to deal with DPA contest v1 dataset, and achieve a better result of 40.76 traces than the winning proposal of 42.42 traces. The computation cost of our proposal is nearly 16.7% of the winner.