Spymasters Tools: A Comparative Approach to Side Channel Attacks

Abstract

In many security protocols implementation of cryptographic algorithms can be thought as both software and hardware manner. The security of cryptographic algorithms is threatened by attacking cryptographic implementations. In public cryptography research on side channel attacks started with works of (Kocher et al. 2004 Kocher 1996 Kocher et al. 1999). Side channel attacks is a passive attack which basically depend on collecting information through physically observable phenomenon's created by the execution of computing tasks in microelectronic devices and logical gates in order to break cryptographic algorithms such as timing information proposed in (Kocher 1996 Jean-Fran et al. 2000) power consumption studied in (Kocher et al. 1999) and electromagnetic radiation in (Agrawal et al. 2003). This paper serves as an introduction to basic level of side channel attacks method and techniques used in these attacks and many other countermeasures such as Simple Power Analysis Differential Power Analysis, Data bit Differential Power Analysis against such attacks.