Rapid Pre-Characterization of Fine-Grained EM Side-Channel (In)Vulnerability of AES Modules

A statistical method that rapidly identifies near-field probe configurations that are ineffective for leaking information from advanced encryption standard (AES) implementations is proposed. The method can be used as a pre-characterization stage to accelerate a recently introduced multistage analysis of variance (ANOVA)-based measurement protocol for evaluating crypto-systems’ vulnerability to fine-grained EM side-channel analysis attacks.