ABSTRACT

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Traditionally, the main task of cryptographic hardware is the acceleration of

operations frequently used in cryptosystems or the acceleration of a complete

cryptographic algorithm. In applications, hardware devices are also required

to store secret or private keys securely. Hence, a cryptographic device must

prevent the extraction of any sensitive information. A side-channel analysis

(SCA) attack takes advantage of implementation-specific characteristics to

recover the secret parameters involved in the computation. It is therefore less

general, but often more powerful than classical cryptanalysis.