Getting Started

Interested in side channel analysis? This page should help you get some ideas of where to start.

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. As of June 2016, The ChipWhisperer Lite (CW1173) is a great way to get started: it comes with a "victim" already connected, so you can start the tutorials out-of-the-box.

Software

ChipWhisperer's software is open-source and freely available online.

• If you want a nice, tidy download, check out the ChipWhisperer Releases. The information on this page will explain how to download and install the software.
• If you're familiar with Git, you can directly clone the ChipWhisperer Repository. This will get you a bleeding-edge copy of the software, which has the most recent bug fixes and the most recent bugs.

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:

Tutorials

See Tutorial Map for important information & suggested order of completion.

Theory

Correlation Power Analysis

Template Attacks

Extending AES-128 Attacks to AES-256

Basic Tutorials

Tutorial B1 Building a SimpleSerial Project

Tutorial B2 Viewing Instruction Power Differences

Tutorial B3-1 Timing Analysis with Power for Password Bypass

Tutorial B5 Breaking AES (Straightforward)

Tutorial B6 Breaking AES (Manual CPA Attack)

Tutorial B7 Profiling Attacks (with HW Assumption)

Tutorial B11 Breaking RSA

Advanced Tutorials

Tutorial A2 Introduction to Glitch Attacks (including Glitch Explorer)

Tutorial A3 VCC Glitch Attacks

Tutorial A5 Breaking AES-256 Bootloader

Tutorial A5-Bonus Breaking AES-256 Bootloader

Tutorial A7 Glitch Buffer Attacks

Tutorial A8 32bit AES

Hardware-Specific Tutorials

Tutorial P1 Stream Mode and Advanced Triggering (CW Pro)

Tutorial CW305-1 Building a Project

Tutorial CW305-2 Breaking AES on FPGA

Tutorial CW305-3 Clock Glitching

Tutorial CW305-4 Voltage Glitching with Crowbars

Archived Tutorials (v4/v3 only)

Tutorial B3-2 Timing Analysis with Power for Attacking TSB

Tutorial B4 Testing Two Partitions of Traces

Tutorial B5-2 Breaking DES (Straightforward)

Tutorial B8 Profiling Attacks (Manual Template Attack)

Tutorial B9 The Preprocessing Modules

Tutorial B10 Using with SASEBO-W CardOS or DPA Contest v4.2

Tutorial A1 Synchronization to Communication Lines

Tutorial A4 SAD Trigger for SCA and Glitch

Tutorial A6 Replication of Ilya Kizhvatov's XMEGA® Attack

Tutorial A9 Bypassing LPC1114 Read Protect

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