Power Analysis Side Channel Attacks and Countermeasures for the Internet of Things

With the explosion in the number of internet of things (IoT) devices in recent years, the security of these devices has become an area of major concerns across the globe. Encryption is an essential means of protecting data in IoT devices, but cryptographic implementations are vulnerable to attacks as well. These vulnerabilities can allow attackers to completely bypass or significantly weaken the theoretical strength of the encryption algorithms. Resistance to cryptanalysis alone is not adequate for building a secure cryptosystem in practice. Power analysis side-channel attacks have emerged as a very effective method of discovering cryptographic keys by monitoring the power consumption of devices. Power consumption of the chips can reveal information about the cryptographic operations being performed or the data being processed. Numerous countermeasures against power analysis attacks have been discussed in the literature. However, all these countermeasures introduce various tradeoffs, such as increased power consumption, decreased performance, and increased space requirements for additional hardware. In addition to strong resistance to power analysis attacks and simplicity of implementation, developers need to evaluate the countermeasures by taking into consideration these tradeoffs while designing and implementing the IoT, which are often operated in heterogenous and highly resource constraint environments. This paper explores the state-of-the art power analysis attacks and their countermeasures and analyze the limitations of these countermeasures based on the constraints present in IoT devices.