The Hardware Hacking Handbook

11 Gettin’ Nerdy with It: Advanced Power Analysis

The previous two chapters, and power analysis literature in general, focused on theoretical understanding of the attacks and applying them in lab conditions. As people who have witnessed a plethora of such attacks, we can tell you that for the majority of actual targets, 10 percent of your time is spent getting the measurement set up in order; 10 percent of your time is running actual power analysis attacks, and the other 80 percent of your time is spent trying to figure out why the attacks are not showing any leakage. That is because your attack will show leakage only if you got every step ...