ABSTRACT
The theoretical security of encryption algorithms, ensured by complexity arguments, is rarely beaten. Most encryption systems are defeated by social engineering, implementation flaws, or side-channel attacks [152]. Side-channel attacks take advantage of the fact that computers are physical objects. Even when it can be proved that the only way to derive the input and/or key of a cryptographic algorithm from the observed program output, that does not mean that the information is secure. The act of computation may have measurable physical consequences that can be measured and used to infer the key and/or data input.
