The A to Z of building a testbed for Power Analysis attacks

Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) based Side Channel Attack (SCA) is a popular modern cryptanalysis typically used by adversaries in embedded devices to break their secret keys. CPA uses the correlation between the power consumption of the cryptosystem and the computation performed to derive the secret key. Proposing countermeasures against such attacks require a testbed for implementation and verification. Although, a large number of such attacks and countermeasures are proposed in the literature, building of testbeds are still not presented properly. Therefore, researchers starting to work on CPA have to spend an enormous amount of time for building and debugging such testbeds. Also, a few testbeds presented in the literature have their limitations. In this paper, we present an A to Z guide for preparing a CPA testbed that also addresses the shortcomings of the existing testbeds in the literature.