Side-channel analysis of AES encryption with different key size

Abstract

This report aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the enhancement of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) when it is implemented with larger key size.

Side-channel analysis is performed on the device that is processing the encryption, thus to observe whether a more complex procedure will be required to recover the secret key that has a larger key size. In this project, power analysis has been set up to obtain the power traces on a microcontroller, when the microcontroller is performing AES encryption with different length of secret keys. As such, increasing the length of the key is proven to be an effective way to enhance the resistance of AES against side-channel attack.