This book offers the latest research results on analog side channels and their usage in cybersecurity. It demystifies analog side channels and demonstrates new use cases for them. The first part of this book discusses how analog side channels are generated, the physics behind it, the modeling and measurements of analog side channels, and their analogies to wireless communication systems. The second part of this book introduces new applications that benefit from leveraging side channels. In addition to breaking cryptography algorithms, it demonstrates how analog side channels can be used for malware detection, program profiling, hardware profiling, hardware/software attestation, hardware identification, and hardware Trojan detection.


Side channel is one of the methods for obtaining information about program execution. Traditionally, they are used in computer science to extract information about a key in cryptographic algorithms. What makes them different from other ways of extracting information about program execution is that side channels rely on how a system implements program execution, rather than what the program’s algorithm specifies. Analog side channels are particularly powerful because they are not easy to suppress or detect that someone is collecting information from the system. Although they are very powerful tools, they are poorly understood.


This book targets advanced level students in computer science and electrical engineering as a textbook. Researchers and professionals working with analog side channels, how to model them, measure them, improve signal to noise ratio, and invent new signal processing techniques can also use this book. Computer scientists and engineers who want to learn new applications of side channels to improve system security, new techniques for breaking cryptography keys, new techniques for attestation, and new techniques for hardware Trojan detection will also want to purchase this book.