Introduction to differential power analysis

By Paul C. Kocher, Joshua Jaffe, Benjamin Jun, Pankaj Rohatgi. Journal of Cryptographic Engineering, 2011

647 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The power consumed by a circuit varies according to the activity of its individual transistors and other components. As a result, measurements of the power used by actual computers or microchips contain information about the operations being performed and the data being processed. Cryptographic designs have traditionally assumed that secrets are manipulated in environments that expose no information beyond the specified inputs and outputs. This paper examines how information leaked through power consumption and other side channels can be analyzed to extract secret keys from a wide range of devices. The attacks are practical, non-invasive, and highly effective—even against complex and noisy systems where cryptographic computations account for only a small fraction of the overall power consumption. We also introduce approaches for preventing DPA attacks and for building cryptosystems that remain secure even when implemented in hardware that leaks.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Hardware and Architecture

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/487e6a85d55c3adbffcd3ce8032b150e90a25bf0

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Citations in the corpus

Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution (2018, background): “Since their introduction in the late 90’s [43], many physical effects such as power consumption [41, 42], electromagnetic radiation [58], or acoustic noise [20] have been leveraged to extract cryptographic keys as well as other secrets.”
A Primer on Hardware Security: Models, Methods, and Metrics (2014, background): “If an estimate of the maximum information leakage rate per transaction ðLMAXÞ were given, the keys should be updated before the amount of leaked information breaches a predefined level [95].”
A survey of microarchitectural timing attacks and countermeasures on contemporary hardware (2016, background): “Stealingsecretssolelythroughhardwaremeans(forexam-ple, through differential power analysis [95,135]) has an extensive treatment in the literature [15,96].”
A Survey of IoT-Enabled Cyberattacks: Assessing Attack Paths to Critical Infrastructures and Services (2018, methodology): “In order to retrieve the embedded hardware key, differential [237] and correlation [238] power analysis techniques were used.”
Security attacks in IoT: A survey (2017, background): “) According to [20], SPA attacks on smartcards typically take a few seconds per card, while DPA attacks can take several hours.”
CacheBleed: a timing attack on OpenSSL constant-time RSA (2016, background): “3 University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA laboratory equipment) of physical phenomena such as electromagnetic radiation [48], power consumption [35,36], or acoustic emanation [25], and software-based attacks, which do not require additional equipment but rely instead on the attacker software r”