Preventing Simple and Differential Power Analysis Attacks
Power analysis attacks cannot generally be detected by a device, since the adversary's monitoring is normally passive. In addition, the attack is non-invasive. As a result, physical enclosures, auditing capabilities, and attack detectors are ineffective. Instead, cryptosystem engineers must ensure that devices' power variations do not reveal information usable by adversaries.
Simple power analysis can easily distinguish the outcome of conditional branches in the execution of cryptographic software, since a device does different things (consuming different power) depending on whether the conditional branch is taken. For this reason, care should be taken to ensure there are no secret values which affect the conditional branches within cryptographic software implementations. Other sources of variation, such as microcode differences, branches introduced by compilers, and power consumption variations in multipliers, also commonly lead to SPA vulnerabilities.
Differential power analysis is more difficult to prevent, since even small biases in the power consumption can lead to exploitable weaknesses. Some countermeasure strategies involve algorithmic modifications such that the cryptographic operations occur on data that is related to the actual value by some mathematical relationship that survives the cryptographic operation. One approach involves blinding parameters to randomize their value. Other countermeasure strategies to reduce the effectiveness of DPA attacks involve hardware modifications: varying the chip internal clock frequency has been considered to desynchronize electric signals, which lead in return to algorithmic enhancements of traditional DPA.,
Read more about this topic: Power Analysis
Famous quotes containing the words preventing, simple, differential, power, analysis and/or attacks:
“If anything characterizes the cultural life of the seventies in America, it is an insistence on preventing failures of communication.”
—Richard Dean Rosen (b. 1949)
“Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analysing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will. I cannot believe that such a programme would be rejected by the people of this country, even if it does mean the establishment of personal contact with the dictators.”
—Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940)
“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)