Thales e-Security's Countermeasure Validation Certification

By Rambus Inc.

June 18, 2018

Side-channel analysis, and specifically Differential Power Analysis (DPA), can be used as an attack, statistically analyzing power consumption measurements from a cryptosystem. DPA attacks exploit biases in the varying power consumption of microprocessors or other hardware while performing operations using secret keys. With DPA, an attacker can obtain secret keys by analyzing power consumption measurements from multiple cryptographic operations performed by a vulnerable device.

Historically, solutions that included robust encryption/decryption algorithms with cryptographic keys were considered secure, as brute force attacks have ultimately become infeasible due to the increased key length of the cryptographic algorithm. However, side-channel attacks bypass some of the mathematical properties of a cryptographic system, instead, focusing on its implementation in hardware or software. Specifically, cryptographic systems routinely leak information about the internal state of computations. As a result, attackers can exploit various techniques to extract the key and other secret information from the device.

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