Power Analysis Attack

---

Power Analysis Attack is an effective way of extracting the content of cryptographic devices, such as smart cards.

• variation in power consumption of a device is used to infer some useful information about the secret content of devices
• two types of power analysis (PA)
  • simple PA
    • attacker observes the device’s current consumption over a period of time
    • different operations exhibit different power profiles
      • thus attacker can infer what type of function is being performed and what data pattern is being transferred or processed
  • differential PA
    • is a statistical method for analyzing power consumption to identify data-dependent correlations in order to improve the quality of information inferred by the attacker
    • more difficult to defend against