Side Channel Attacks Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

Side Channel Attacks - Essay Example Zhou and Feng (2011) observed that cryptographic devices’ physical attacks tends to take advantage of implementation-specific features to convalesce the secrete considerations factored in during computation. As a result, they are much less general because they are specific to a particular implementation, but rather more powerful than classical cryptanalysis that is normally perceived to be very serious by cryptographic device manufacturers, according to Zhou and Feng (2011). There are usually numerous such physical attacks, which falls under two broad categories namely invasive vs. non-invasive attacks and active vs. passive attacks. Invasive attacks, according to Zhou and Feng (2011) need de-packaging of the chip in order to have direct access to the components inside it. A classical example of invasive attack can be a wire connection onto a data bus to be able to view the data transfers (Bao et al., 2011). A non-invasive attack, on the other hand, only uses information avail able externally, such as power consumption and running time, according to Zhou and Feng (2011). ... Therefore, the side-channel attacks that this paper seeks to explore are a form of physical attacks where an adversary attempts to exploit the leakages of physical information such as power consumption, timing information, or electromagnetic radiation. Skorobogatov (2011) defines side-channel attacks as any form of physical attack based on information obtained from the physical implementation of a cryptosystem, but not brute force in the algorithms. Skorobogatov (2011) reveals that side-channel attacks pertain to measuring changeability of hardware and analyzing the behavior of the algorithm that runs the hardware in question. However, since the information leakages resulting from side-channel attacks are passive, non-invasive and can easily be performed using cheap equipment, they pose danger to the security of cryptographic hardware devices, according to Skorobogatov (2011). The cryptographic devices include among other things personal computers, smart cards, and radio frequency id entification devices (RFIDs) among others. Their proliferation has made the physical security and side-channel attacks a major concern that need to be examines in details (Bidgoli, 2006). This paper will begin by examining the basics of side-channel attacks. Among the issues discussed in this section, include the genesis of unintended information leakages in latest microelectronic technologies and how the physical features can be recovered using a simple measurement setups. This will be followed by an exploration of some of the typical examples of side-channel attacks such as the differential power analysis (DPA) and simple power analysis (SPA).