Power Analysis and Algorithmic Security
Power analysis provides a way to "see inside" otherwise 'tamperproof' hardware. For example, DES's key schedule involves rotating 28-bit key registers. Many implementations check the least significant bit to see if it is a 1. If so, the device shifts the register right and prepends the 1 at the left end. If the bit is a zero, the register is shifted right without prepending a 1. Power analysis can distinguish between these processes, enabling an adversary to determine the bits of the secret key.
Implementations of algorithms such as AES and triple DES that are believed to be mathematically strong may be trivially breakable using power analysis attacks. As a result, power analysis attacks combine elements of algorithmic cryptanalysis and implementation security.
Read more about this topic: Power Analysis
Famous quotes containing the words power, analysis and/or security:
“Every diminution of the public burdens arising from taxation gives to individual enterprise increased power and furnishes to all the members of our happy confederacy new motives for patriotic affection and support.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)