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Comment by jnwatson

The term of art for this kind of attack is SPA (simple power analysis). The fact that this is possible means that this is amateur hour engineering, with very little security QA. The more sophisticated attacks use DPA, differential power analysis, which accumulate the results of multiple runs and performs statistical analysis.

When I was on a team that made a similar device over a decade ago, we were up to our eyeballs in academic papers about SPA and DPA hardware and software countermeasures. That doesn't mean we didn't make any mistakes, but at least we were knowledgeable enough to hook an oscilloscope up and see what's going on.

These guys completely ignored an entire class of attacks, known in detail for a couple decades, (in reality since 1943, declassified 1972 ([1]). I wouldn't trust these guys to protect anything of value.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2008/04/nsa-releases-se/

parent jnwatson 8 years ago

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