Changes

This tutorial will introduce you to measuring the power consumption of a device under attack. It will demonstrate how you can view the difference between a 'add' instruction and a 'mul' instruction.

You should have already completed [[Tutorial_B1_Building_a_SimpleSerial_Project]]. This tutorial assumes you are capable of building a new AVR/XMEGA code, programming the code, and connecting to the ChipWhisperer.

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<li>Ensure the hardware is setup as in [[Tutorial_B1_Building_a_SimpleSerial_Project]]. If using the CW1002, ensure the SMA cable is also connected as described in the previous tutorial.</li></ol>

The basic steps to connect to the ChipWhisperer device are described in [[Tutorial_B1_Building_a_SimpleSerial_Project]]. They are repeated here as well, however see [[Tutorial_B1_Building_a_SimpleSerial_Project]] for pictures &amp; mode details.

<li>Try a few more ''Capture 1'' traces, and you should see a 'zoomed-in' waveform.</li></ol>

This tutorial is using either an AtMega328p which is an Atmel AVR device, or AtXMEGA128D4 which is an Atmel XMEGA device. We are comparing the power consumption of two different instructions, the <code>MUL</code> (multiply) instruction and the <code>NOP</code> (no operation) instruction. Some information on these two instructions:

Note that the capture clock is running at 4x the device clock. Thus a single <code>mul</code> instruction should span 8 samples on our output graph, since it takes 4 samples to cover a complete clock cycle.

The initial code has a power signature something like this (yours will vary based on various physical considerations, and depending if you are using an XMEGA or AVR device):

Note that the 10 <code>mul</code> instructions would be expected to take 80 samples to complete, and the 10 <code>nop</code> instructions should take 40 samples to complete. By modifying the code we can determine exactly which portion of the trace is corresponding to which operations.

We will then modify the code to have twenty NOP operations in a row instead of ten. The modified code looks like this:

Pay particular attention to the section between sample number 0 &amp; sample number 180. It is in this section we can compare the two power graphs to see the modified code. We can actually 'see' the change in operation of the device! It would appear the <code>nop</code> is occuring from approximately 10-90, and the <code>mul</code> occuring from 90-170.

Finally, we will add 10 more NOPs after the 10 MULs. The code should look something like this:

<blockquote>[[File:cap_doublenop_mul_nop.png|image]]

</blockquote>

The following graph lines the three options up. One can see where adding loops of different operations shows up in the power consumption.

<blockquote>[[File:nop_mul_comparison.png|image]]

</blockquote>

A final area of interest is the clock phase adjustment. The clock phase adjustment is used to shift the ADC sample clock from the actual device clock by small amounts. This will affect the appearance of the captured waveform, and in more advanced methods is used to improve the measurement.

The specifics of the capture are highly dependent on each ChipWhisperer board &amp; target platform. The phase shift allows customization of the capture waveform for optimum performance, however what constitutes 'optimum performance' is highly dependent on the specifics of your algorithm.

In this tutorial you have learned how power analysis can tell you the operations being performed on a microcontroller. In future work we will move towards using this for breaking various forms of security on devices.