Kocher, Jaffe & Jun's 1999 Differential Power Analysis paper founded power side-channel cryptanalysis by showing chip power consumption leaks secret keys

Paul Kocher, Joshua Jaffe, and Benjamin Jun's "Differential Power Analysis" (CRYPTO '99) established that "actual computers and microchips leak information about the operations they process" through their power consumption, and that this leakage is exploitable: by statistically analyzing many power-consumption traces recorded during cryptographic operations, an attacker can recover secret keys from otherwise tamper-resistant hardware — even when the individual signal is too noisy to read by simple inspection. This founded an entire subfield of hardware-security cryptanalysis (power side-channel / power analysis attacks) built on a single physical premise: computation is not electrically silent about what it computes.

The attack model assumed here required physical or electrical proximity to the target chip — probes on the device, direct measurement of its power rail. That constraint is the load-bearing detail for tracing this idea forward: nineteen years later, Zhao & Suh (2018) showed the same leakage could be read without any physical access at all, via a shared multi-tenant FPGA, and twenty-seven years later Bit2Watt (2026) showed the same "power carries information" principle scaled to an entire electrical grid. See claim-power-side-channel-attacks-scaled-chip-to-grid-1999-2026 for that full lineage.