In the past few decades, DPA-based side-channel attack strategies, such as DPA and CPA, have shown strong ability to analyze the security of the cryptographic implementations. However, the unpredictability of the leakage model and the correspondence between leakage behavior of the target device and the hypothetical leakage value make it less-effective without prior knowledge. Therefore, in this paper, we present a novel generic side-channel analysis method called Gini-impurity Index Analysis (GIA), utilizing Gini-impurity Index as the distinguisher, which can perform well even without any leakage model and is not sensitive to the existing methods' restrictions about the leakage behavior. Firstly, we introduce the basic idea of GIA. According to the proposed GIA attack strategy, the Gini-impurity index for each key hypothesis should be calculated, determined by the clustered power consumption and the classified subsets based on the key dependent target function. Secondly, we verify the feasibility and evaluate the efficiency of GIA with different target functions by the practical experimental results against AES-128 implemented on an AT89S52 microcontroller. We present one possible multivariate extension of GIA and find the advantage of GIA on leakage information utilization. Thirdly, we present the results of comparisons. On the one hand, we compare GIA with three widely-used distinguishers under simulated traces in various leakage scenarios and practical traces with Hamming-weight-related leakage. Results confirm that GIA can always perform well with different leakage models in most situations. On the other hand, we analyze the relationship between GIA and Mutual Information Analysis (MIA). Theoretical and experimental results confirm that these two methods can obtain similar attack results. However, the guessing entropy of GIA is lower than MIA by up to 21%, and the averaged computational time overhead of GIA is lower than MIA by up to 13.3%, indicating that GIA is more efficient than MIA. Compared to traditional MIA, GIA is easier to operate and more flexible with noise. Therefore, GIA is an efficient and useful alternative to these existed strategies.

Hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) is widely used in authentication and message integrity. As a Chinese hash algorithm, the SM3 algorithm is gradually winning domestic market value in China. The side channel security of HMAC based on SM3 (HMAC-SM3) is still to be evaluated, especially in hardware implementation, where only intermediate values stored in registers have apparent Hamming distance leakage. In addition, the algorithm structure of SM3 determines the difficulty in HMAC-SM3 side channel analysis. In this paper, a skillful bit-wise chosen-plaintext correlation power attack procedure is proposed for HMAC-SM3 hardware implementation. Real attack experiments on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) board have been performed. Experimental results show that we can recover the key from the hypothesis space of 2 256 based on the proposed procedure.

Side-channel collision attacks are more powerful than traditional side-channel attack without knowing the leakage model or establishing the model. Most attack strategies proposed previously need quantities of power traces with high computational complexity and are sensitive to mistakes, which restricts the attack efficiency seriously. In this paper, we propose a multiple-bits side-channel collision attack based on double distance voting detection (DDVD) and also an improved version, involving the error-tolerant mechanism, which can find all 120 relations among 16 key bytes when applied to AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm. In addition, we compare our collision detection method called DDVD with the Euclidean distance and the correlation-enhanced collision method under different intensity of noise, which indicates that our detection technique performs better in the circumstances of noise. Furthermore, 4-bit model of our collision detection method is proven to be optimal in theory and in practice. Meanwhile the corresponding practical attack experiments are also performed on a hardware implementation of AES-128 on FPGA board successfully. Results show that our strategy needs less computation time but more traces than LDPC method and the online time for our strategy is about 90% less than CECA and 96% less than BCA with 90% success rate.