ASCON CPA Attack with Chipwhisperer

Embedded Security Side Channel Power Analysis
1

Hi, I’m an engineering student, and I’m working on a small research project that involves ASCON and side channel attacks.
I have access to a ChipWhisperer Lite 32-bit and for the past few weeks I have used it to learn how to do CPA. I have followed the SCA101 course so far, and I think I can mostly understand how a CPA attack works. I also looked a bit into SCA201.
I want now to try to do the same attack I learned in the course on ASCON, but I’m not sure where to start. Do I just need to load an ASCON implementation on the card and do the same as in lab 4_3 and 5_1 ?
What else would I have to change ?

(PS : I’m sorry if the subject is explained in other courses, I don’t have much time to work on this project and there are a lot of courses)

2

This is certainly possible to do. You’ll need to:

  1. implement ASCON on the target;
  2. implement the side-channel attack.

We don’t have examples for either of these. I’m not familiar with side-channel attacks on ASCON so I don’t know whether AES CPA attacks are applicable, but surely there is lots of published literature on this.