Getting the Most Out of Leakage Detection - Statistical Tools and Measurement Setups Hand in Hand.

In this work, we provide a concrete investigation of the gains that can be obtained by combining good measurement setups and efficient leakage detection tests to speed up evaluation times. For this purpose, we first analyze the quality of various measurement setups. Then, we highlight the positive impact of a recent proposal for efficient leakage detection, based on the analysis of a (few) pair(s) of plaintexts. Finally, we show that the combination of our best setups and detection tools allows detecting leakages for a noisy threshold implementation of the block cipher PRESENT after an intensive measurement phase, while either worse setups or less efficient detection tests would not succeed in detecting these leakages. Overall, our results show that a combination of good setups and fast leakage detection can turn security evaluation times from days to hours (for first-order secure implementations) and even from weeks to days (for higher-order secure implementations).