Simple Power Analysis

Synonyms

SPA

Definitions

Simple power analysis refers to a side-channel analysis attack where an adversary observes the power consumption of a cryptographic device with the goal of recovering its internal secret, i.e., secret key material stored on-device and used for encryption or decryption by either a symmetric or an asymmetric cryptographic algorithm. Ideally, only a single power trace suffices to recover the secret key.

Background

The term simple power analysis has been initially defined by P. Kocher et al. in 1999. Their work presents the first successful power analysis attack on cryptographic devices.

Theory

By the term cryptographic device, we refer to a circuitry (usually CMOS) that performs a certain cryptographic algorithm. A cryptographic device can be a general-purpose microprocessor, in which a set of instructions realizes a cryptographic algorithm, or it can be a dedicated piece of hardware, e.g., an FPGA or an ASIC, which has been specifically designed to speed up the...