Devices will oftentimes consume variable amounts of power depending on the operations the device is performing. Power consumption analysis involves the reading and analyzing of power usage of a device. If a device is vulnerable to a power consumption analysis attack, it may be possible to extract or deduce information about the operating state of the device. This can include extracting secrets/keys, discovering operations conducted on sections of memory, and device control flow. A threat actor can therefore physically monitor the power consumption of a device during an execution of a cryptographic operation to create a trace of its power usage over time. By leveraging the understanding of the operations of common cryptographic properties, the power usage traces can be used to infer various information, such as the cryptographic keys.

• CWE-1300: Improper Protection of Physical Side Channels (Base)
• CWE-1255: Comparison Logic is Vulnerable to Power Side-Channel Attacks (Variant)