Simple Power Analysis

Abstract

Simple power analysis (SPA) attacks are characterized by Kocher et al. in [KJJ99] in the following way: “SPA is a technique that involves directly interpreting power consumption measurements collected during cryptographic operations.” In other words, the attacker tries to derive the key more or less directly from a given trace. This can make SPA attacks quite challenging in practice. Often, they require detailed knowledge about the implementation of the cryptographic algorithm that is executed by the device under attack. Furthermore, if only one power trace is available, usually complex statistical methods have to be used in order to extract the signal.