Leakage and Attack Tools
Davide Bellizia, Adrian Thillard · 2025
Informative physical leakages have been a primary concern in the design and the implementation of systems processing sensitive information, as it has been widely demonstrated that they provide a huge attack surface for malicious adversaries. This chapter first introduces the physics behind most common side-channels, discussing what the root causes are that generate informative leakages through measurable emissions and how to capture them. It discusses common and generic models used in side-channel analysis, and concludes with a brief review of main platforms and tools available for investigating side-channel attacks, focusing on open-hardware and/or open-source ones. Side-channel traces are measurements of physical phenomena occurring within the targeted device. A mathematical model is required in order to gain a sound understanding of exactly how these traces relate to the data being manipulated.