On Practical Results of the Differential Power Analysis

This paper describes practical differential power analysis attacks. There are presented successful and unsuccessful attack attempts with the description of the attack methodology. It provides relevant information about oscilloscope settings, optimization possibilities and fundamental attack principles, which are important when realizing this type of attack.

The attack was conducted on the PIC18F2420 microcontroller, using the AES cryptographic algorithm in the ECB mode with the 128-bit key length. We used two implementations of this algorithm - in the C programming language and in the assembler.