All respect to Colin, especially for his nice visualization of the cache behavior for RSA. However, I think the Tromer paper has more detail on multiple approac

All respect to Colin, especially for his nice visualization of the cache behavior for RSA. However, I think the Tromer paper has more detail on multiple approaches to measuring cache behavior. It also pertains to AES, so you can compare side channel analysis of symmetric algorithms vs. public key. http://people.csail.mit.edu/tromer/papers/cache.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/tromer/papers/cache.pdf A lot of approaches can work without "eyeballing" the timings. The Aciicmez paper on BTB predictor side channels shows how you can retrieve the key in a single trace. It shows the interesting result that randomness, such as blinding, has no effect because it only helps when you're trying to compare multiple traces! (They take multiple traces, but then use a heuristic to throw out those that have too much jitter from other system behavior and then only analyze the one best trace.) http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/351 http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/351 http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/482 http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/482 http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/039 http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/039 http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/336 http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/336 This discussion is timely since I've written an article comparing the various side channel attack approaches for IEEE Magazine's Dec 2009 issue. It should be available online soon.