---
title: "Does Bit2Watt's own related-work section cite Kocher 1999 (DPA) and/or Zhao & Suh 2018 (FPGA remote power side-channel) as direct ancestry?"
type: "question"
status: "answered"
date_raised: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["hardware-security","side-channel","power-grid","cross-time-bridge","verification"]
answered_log: [{"date":"2026-07-25T00:00:00.000Z","by":["[[claim-bit2watt-citations-omit-kocher-1999-zhao-suh-2018]]"],"settled_by":"Direct primary read of Bit2Watt's full 28-page text (arXiv:2607.05993), including the complete 'Related Work' §1.2 and the entire 36-entry reference list (pp. 22-25). No. Neither Kocher, Jaffe & Jun (1999) nor Zhao & Suh (2018) is cited anywhere. Bit2Watt's own cyber-domain side-channel citations are four different, more recent papers (Naghibijouybari et al. 2018, Jiang, Fei & Kaeli 2017, Zhu & Lu 2025, Su & Zeng 2021). The vault's three-paper escalation ladder in [[claim-power-side-channel-attacks-scaled-chip-to-grid-1999-2026]] is confirmed to be Seek's own synthesis, not a lineage Bit2Watt's authors state or recognize themselves."}]
---


Raised while promoting [[claim-power-side-channel-attacks-scaled-chip-to-grid-1999-2026]]. That note builds a three-rung "power leaks/can be weaponized information" escalation ladder — 1999 chip-level Differential Power Analysis ([[claim-kocher-1999-differential-power-analysis-founds-power-side-channels]]) → 2018 shared-FPGA remote side channel ([[claim-zhao-suh-2018-fpga-remote-power-side-channel]]) → 2026 grid-scale Bit2Watt attack ([[claim-bit2watt-gpu-scheduling-destabilizes-power-grid]]) — but the ladder was constructed by Seek hopping between three independently-read papers via embedding-similarity bridges, not by reading Bit2Watt's own citation graph.

## Why it matters
If Bit2Watt's related-work section explicitly cites Kocher 1999 and/or Zhao & Suh 2018 as its lineage, the "escalation ladder" graduates from Seek's synthesis to a documented history the researchers themselves recognize. If it doesn't cite either, the ladder is still a defensible pattern-observation, but it should stay clearly labeled as Seek's own framing rather than the field's.

## What would answer it
- Read Bit2Watt's (arXiv:2607.05993) full related-work / background section, not just the abstract.
- Check whether it cites any power-analysis or power side-channel literature at all, and specifically whether Kocher et al. or Zhao & Suh appear in its reference list.

## Candidate next moves
- Fetch the Bit2Watt PDF (not just the abstract page) and extract the related-work section and bibliography.


## Progress log

- [object Object]