Side channel research in 2014: overview, statistics, and new directions?

Many times I have hard from fellow academic researchers, and also from industrial collaborators, how useful it would be to have somebody produce an overview for the last year in side channel research. Now being a well established topic, relevant papers appear across many different conferences, workshops, and journals. Keeping track of the important innovations in any year becomes then a time consuming task. Luckily I have plenty of PhD students at present!

Over January and February, we have (re) read many papers (that were published in 2014) to identify emerging themes and hot topics. We tirelessly queried Google Scholar to obtain some relevant (?) citation statistics, and eventually, we typed this up in a reasonably readable manner: the first Side Channel Almanac is hence now available on the SILENT web site for public enjoyment!

The 2014 Bristol Side Channel Almanac features four research themes:

Efficiently extracting all information from leakage traces.

Developing theory around the fundamental statistical methods for information extraction.

Exploring and advancing new (or less well-researched) side-channels or attacks.

Making cryptography provably leakage resilient.

For each theme, we highlight (what we think are) the key contributions this year: this also mean a big pat on the back of the authors of these!