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:
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its “great intellects.””
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“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)
“Thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness
Share with thy birthright! Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none. Be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend
Under thy own life’s key. Be checked for silence
But never taxed for speech.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)