Variable Window Power Spectral Density Attack

Side channel attacks permit the recovery of the secret key held within a cryptographic device. This paper presents a new EM attack in the frequency domain, using a power spectral density analysis that permits the use of variable spectral window widths for each trace of the data set and demonstrates how this attack can therefore overcome both inter-and intra-round random insertion type countermeasures. We also propose a novel re-alignment method exploiting the minimal power markers exhibited by electromagnetic emanations. The technique can be used for the extraction and re-alignment of round data in the time domain.