Towards High-Quality Electromagnetic Leakage Acquisition in Side-Channel Analysis

Side-channel leakage acquisition plays a crucial role in side-channel analysis against cryptographic implementations, since it usually has a decisional impact on the security claims of the target devices. While most existing research has concentrated on power consumption acquisition settings, the exploration of electromagnetic (EM) radiation leakage acquisition remains limited and surprisingly under-discussed. In this study, we systematically investigate the parameter setting for EM leakage acquisition across two devices of different architectures. We specifically examine the effects of the amplifier, coupling mode, sampling rate, and EM probe on the quality of collected EM traces. For the first device STM32F405, our proposed optimal acquisition settings enhance the signal-to-noise ratio by a factor of 16 compared to the reference settings and reduce the number of EM traces required to achieve a success rate of 90% by a factor of 38. For the second device ATmega2560, the optimal settings improve the signal-to-noise ratio by a factor of 400 compared to the reference settings and reduce the number of EM traces required to achieve a success rate of 90% by a factor of 320. In summary, this work offers a comprehensive investigation into high-quality EM leakage acquisition. While some conclusions may be specific to certain devices, we believe that the proposed guidelines can be applied to EM trace acquisition in other devices as well.