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ChipWhisperer
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ChipWhisperer

ChipWhisperer is NewAE Technology's open-source hardware security toolchain for side-channel power analysis and fault injection research, comprising capture-board hardware/PCB schematics, USB and FPGA firmware, target device firmware examples, and Python APIs (ChipWhisperer Capture and Analyzer) for acquiring and processing power traces. It's widely used to demonstrate and teach attacks like differential power analysis (DPA) and voltage/clock glitching against embedded targets such as microcontrollers and crypto implementations. The repository is undergoing a git-history cleanup for the 6.0 release, splitting files across companion repos including chipwhisperer-jupyter.

TL;DR Open-source hardware toolchain (board + firmware + Python API) for side-channel power analysis and fault-injection attacks on embedded devices.
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What it is

ChipWhisperer is NewAE Technology's open-source toolchain for hardware security research. The current README describes release 7.0, not the 6.0 cleanup the catalog summary mentions. It also announces a new online course, SCA101, at learn.chipwhisperer.io.

What changed in 7.0

The page lists these changes:

  • New Zarr-based projects, with more functionality than the old project format.
  • A new CPA attack class with major performance improvements, and a better results API for CPA attacks.
  • A simpler project and analyzer API.
  • Integer math used throughout the project.
  • Removal of unmaintained parts of Analyzer.
  • The MixColumns attack ported to Analyzer.
  • Iterators for KTP classes.

A separate, more thorough change document is linked from the README. This analysis did not read it.

Preconditions / Affected

Scripts, notebooks or saved projects written against the 6.x Analyzer and project APIs may break. The 7.0 changes simplify the project and analyzer API, replace the project format and remove parts of Analyzer. The page does not say which calls are affected or whether old projects can be converted.

What to do

To keep working with the previous API, use the final commit that still has it, tagged v6.1.0. For a new setup, the README points to the new documentation site, the NewAE Forum for questions, and the issue tracker for bugs.

The hardware layer is described as a capture board plus a target board. Schematics and PCB layouts are published for the ChipWhisperer-Husky capture board and several target boards. The capture board runs open-source USB controller firmware (C) and FPGA firmware (Verilog). The repository also holds target firmware examples.

Caveats

The README does not give a 7.0 release date or a migration guide. It does not say whether the 6.0 history cleanup and the split into companion repos, such as chipwhisperer-jupyter, still applies.

Technologies named here

  • ChipWhisperer
  • Python
  • Verilog

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