Real-World Cryptography

13 Hardware cryptography

This chapter covers

• Cryptography issues in highly adversarial environments
• Hardware solutions to increase the attacker’s cost
• Side-channel attacks and software mitigations

Cryptographic primitives and protocols are often described as isolated building blocks as if they were running in a galaxy far, far away from any adversary. In practice, this is an unrealistic assumption that has often proven wrong. In the real world, cryptography runs in all kinds of environments and is subject to all sorts of threats. In this chapter, we’ll look at the more extreme scenarios—the highly adversarial environments—and what you can do to protect your keys and your data in these situations. (Spoiler alert: it involves using specialized ...