Who cares about side-channel attacks?

[Ben Laurie]

Peter Gutmann wrote:
> In fact none of the people/organisations I queried about this fitted into any 
> of the proposed categories, it was all embedded devices, typically SCADA 
> systems, home automation, consumer electronics, that sort of thing, so it was 
> really a single category which was "Embedded systems".  Given the string of 
> attacks on crypto in embedded devices (XBox, iPhone, iOpener, Wii, some 
> not-yet-published ones on HDCP devices :-), etc) this is by far the most 
> at-risk category because there's a huge incentive to attack them, the result 
> affects tens/hundreds of millions of devices, and the attacks are immediately 
> and widely actively exploited (modchips/device unlocking/etc, an important 
> difference between this and academic proof-of-concept attacks), so this is the 
> one where I'd expect the vendors to care most.

But they've all been unlocked using easier attacks, surely?

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