A Tutorial on Physical Security and Side-Channel Attacks

Abstract

A recent branch of cryptography focuses on the physical con-straints that a real-life cryptographic device must face, and attempts to exploit these constraints (running time, power consumption, . . .) to expose the device's secrets. This gave birth to implementation-specific attacks, which often turned out to be much more efficient than the best known cryptanalytic attacks against the underlying primitive as an ide-alized object. This paper aims at providing a tutorial on the subject, overviewing the main kinds of attacks and highlighting their underlying principles.