On June 21st 2018, the Potomac Institute's VITAL Center hosted Michael Mehlberg of Rambus, Inc. A growing avenue for gaining sensitive information from chips is the class of side channel attacks.  Attackers use available indirect signals, e.g. timing information and power consumption, from a chip to decipher cryptographic keys and/or learn other information being transmitted within the system being attacked.  Mr.Mehlbergdemonstrated how secret cryptography keys can be extracted from a mobile phone and FPGA by measuring the power consumption of those devices during decryption; an exploit publicly discovered by Cryptography Research in the late ‘90s.

Mike Mehlberg leads the Business Development for Government and Defense at the Security Division and Cryptography Products Group for Rambus, Inc. in the Washington DC area. He has a bachelor of Computer Science from Purdue University and 15 years of experience securing weapons systems from tampering and reverse engineering exploits.

To view a demonstration of a side channel attack similar to the attack demonstrated by Mr. Mehlberg, please click