Power Side Channel Attacks: Where Are We Standing?

Abstract

Side channel attacks are a serious threat to integrated circuits. They are hardly detectable and use inherent information leaked by the hardware to infer sensitive information like secret keys. Over the last ten years, numerous side channel attacks have been examined, exploring various forms of leakage channels such as time, power, electromagnetic field, photon emission, and acoustic. Among them, power side channel attacks are the most popular ones. Developing an appropriate counter-measure against such attacks requires a deep understanding of these attacks. This paper presents a study of the most popular power attacks such as differential power attack and correlation power attack and discusses the latest countermeasures in this domain and their shortcomings.