Power Analysis Attack
Power analysis attacks measure the power-consumption traces of a cryptographic device (smart card, HSM) during operation and recover the key via statistical correlation (CPA/DPA).
Purpose
They assess smart cards’ and embedded crypto devices’ resistance to power leakage, a core part of hardware security evaluation.
Mechanism
SPA (simple power analysis) reads branches directly from a single trace; DPA (differential power analysis) groups many traces by key hypothesis and looks for differential peaks — a peak confirms the hypothesis. CPA replaces differences with correlation coefficients.
Use cases
- Smart-card security assessment
- HSM side-channel testing
- EMV payment card security