Frequently Asked Questions
About the Contest
How to mention or cite the ``DPA contest v2'' in a publication?
Use the permanent link https://dpacontest.telecom-paris.fr, and this reference if you refer to all the attacks of this 2nd version of the contest.
Participation
Will the code of my attack be made public?
During the first edition of the DPA contest, all attacks were made public as soon as they were sent to us.
For this second edition of the DPA contest, we choose to make attacks sent to us public only after the submission deadline. In addition, if you want, you can ask us not to publish the code of your attack. However, in all the cases, the evaluation results of your attack are posted without delay on the Hall of Fame page.
What is the deadline for attack submission?
The submission deadline is fixed to Wednesday 14th of July 2010, 23:59 UTC. Attacks submitted after this deadline may not be evaluated and may not appear in the hall of fame.
How can I develop a template attack?
The first thing you need is the template database of traces by itself and the corresponding index file. They are both available for download from the Download page.
The index file contains one line per trace in the template base and 4 columns, separated by a space. The first column contains the key (32 hexadecimal chars), the second contains the plaintext (32 hexadecimal chars), the third contains the ciphertext (32 hexadecimal chars) and the fourth contains the filename of the trace.
The format of the file containing a trace is simple: lines beginning with a # are the headers produced by the oscilloscope during acquisition and the other lines contain the value of each sample of the trace (one per line). A trace contains exactly 3,253 samples. If you want, you can reuse a part of the code of the wrapper (either for Unix or for Windows) to read a trace.
Next, you have several options for the template part of your attack:
Option 1. If the data produced by the template phase of your attack is small, you can directly embed it into your attack code as data structure(s). In this case, you have to send us the tool which has produced these data structures from the template base, in addition to the attack itself.
Option 2. If the data produced by the template phase of your attack is larger (few MBytes), you can store it in one or more files. These files will be read by your attack during the evaluation (you have to put the necessary code to read them into your attack code). In this case, you have to send us the tool which has produced these files from the template base, in addition to the attack and the files.
Download
How to extract .tar, .tar.bz2 and .tar.bz2.partx files?
The instructions are available on the Download page.
Matlab
Security permission problem for IO under Windows
Under Windows, is you execute Matlab from a network disk or if you have extracted the tools on a network disk, you may get a IO security permission problem during the execution of your attack. This problem is due to default .NET framework security permission that considers programs loaded from network drive as belonging to Local Intranet security group which do not have rights to open and write files (for instance the result file).
You can ask your system administrator to execute the procedure described in the Matlab documentation.
If it still does not work, ask your system administrator to launch the following command:
CasPol.exe -m -ag 1.2 -url file://\\machine/mountpoint/* FullTrust
And replace machine/mountpoint with the mount point of your network drive containing matlab and/or the attack wrapper.