Hardware

ChipWhisperer is maintained by NewAE Technology Inc. The ChipWhisperer boards take away the frustration of setting up the hardware for side channel attacks. You can get your hands on one of the boards at The NewAE Store.

To perform a side channel attack, you need two things:

• A capture board. This is an oscilloscope on steroids: it has special hardware that it uses to capture very small signals with a precisely synchronized clock.
• A target board. This is typically a processor that can be programmed to perform some kind of secure operation.

The simplest way to get started is to get a CW1173 ChipWhisperer-Lite: this comes with the capture hardware and the target together on a single board. For more advanced work, you can get a CW308 UFO Target, which is a base board that supports many types of targets. Alternatively, you can attack an FPGA target with the CW305 Artix FPGA Target.

Software

ChipWhisperer's software is open-source and freely available online. To get everything set up, follow the instructions at Installing ChipWhisperer. If you know what you're doing, you can head straight to the Github page.

Tutorials

The tutorials on this wiki provide an introduction to ChipWhisperer. The main focus in these tutorials is breaking AES-128; if this is your main goal, start with these three tutorials:

• Tutorial B1 Building a SimpleSerial Project to get used to the ChipWhisperer framework
• Tutorial B2 Viewing Instruction Power Differences to experiment with capturing traces
• Tutorial B5 Breaking AES (Straightforward) to break AES!

A full list of tutorials is:

Further Reading

Some various papers, slides, books, and other places to look to get you excited about side channel analysis...

• The original paper on side channel analysis, which started all of this
• The NewAE Forum for support or inspiration
• Colin's 2013 Whitepaper on ChipWhisperer
• Colin's Slides from CHES2013
• The book Power Analysis Attacks, which is a great overview of the math involved and provides tons of examples of attacks
• The book Understanding Cryptography for an introduction to cryptography algorthms
• Academic Papers that use ChipWhisperer for various attacks and security testing.