I want to look at ways to relate physical models to core security concepts such as cryptography, to raise awareness and understanding of security for those who are less technical. As part of this I’ll be looking at mapping picking to power analysis, a technique for monitoring power consumption in hardware to discover cryptographic secrets.
Mechanical lock picking is an obvious starting point for this form of teaching since the terminology carries across reasonably well (or at least everyone understands keys) to digital lock picking. The first problem is that while it is simple enough to come up with a lockbox analogy for symmetric and asymmetric encryption, the single pin picking of locks doesn’t map across quite so well. Continue reading “Teaching Cryptography with Lockpicking”