Side Channel Attack - General

General

General classes of side channel attack include:

• Timing attack — attacks based on measuring how much time various computations take to perform.
• Power monitoring attack — attacks which make use of varying power consumption by the hardware during computation.
• Electromagnetic attacks — attacks based on leaked electromagnetic radiation which can directly provide plaintexts and other information. Such measurements can be used to infer cryptographic keys using techniques equivalent to those in power analysis, or can be used in non-cryptographic attacks, e.g. TEMPEST (aka van Eck phreaking or radiation monitoring) attacks.
• Acoustic cryptanalysis — attacks which exploit sound produced during a computation (rather like power analysis).
• Differential fault analysis — in which secrets are discovered by introducing faults in a computation.
• Data remanence — in which sensitive data are read after supposedly having been deleted.

In all cases, the underlying principle is that physical effects caused by the operation of a cryptosystem (on the side) can provide useful extra information about secrets in the system, for example, the cryptographic key, partial state information, full or partial plaintexts and so forth. The term cryptophthora (secret degradation) is sometimes used to express the degradation of secret key material resulting from side channel leakage.