Side Channel Attacks and Countermeasures

Dear Colleagues,

Cryptosystems are widely used in a growing number of embedded applications, such as smart cards, smart phones, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and so on. Although these cryptosystems have been proven to be safe using mathematical tools, they could be susceptible to physical attacks that exploit additional sources of information, including timing information, power consumption, electromagnetic emissions (EM), sound, and so on. First introduced by Kocher, these types of attacks are referred to as side-channel attacks (SCAs). These attacks pose a very serious threat to embedded systems with cryptographic algorithms. For the past few years, there has been a great deal of effort in finding various SCAs and developing secure countermeasures.

This Special Issue of Applied Sciences is dedicated to outlining the state-of-the-art technologies in the area of side-channel attacks. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Power, EM, timing, acoustic, fault, and cache attacks;
• Countermeasures against side-channel attacks
• Higher-order side channel attacks;
• Higher-order masking countermeasures;
• Signal processing for side-channel attacks;
• Modeling of side-channel attacks;
• Profiling attacks;
• Machine learning-based side-channel attacks;
• Side-channel attacks against post-quantum cryptography;
• Single trace attacks against public key cryptosystems;
• Differential computation analysis against white-box cryptography and its countermeasures;
• Physical unclonable functions (PUFs).

Prof. Dr. Dong-Guk Han
Guest Editor

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