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ChipWhisperer is an open source toolchain dedicated to hardware security research. This toolchain consists of several layers of open source components:
- Hardware: The ChipWhisperer uses a capture board and a target board. Schematics and PCB layouts for the ChipWhisperer-Lite capture board and a number of target boards are freely available.
- Firmware: Three separate pieces of firmware are used on the ChipWhisperer hardware. The capture board has a USB controller (in C) and an FPGA for high-speed captures (in Verilog) with open-source firmware. Also, the target device has its own firmware; this repository includes many firmware examples for different targets.
- Software: The ChipWhisperer software is made up of a capture program to control the hardware and an analyzer program to process captured data.
The biggest (and most breaking) change is here. ChipWhisperer 5.0 uses Python 3 & Juypter Notebooks. Here is a brief summary of improvements:
- Uses Jupyter Notebooks
- Python 3
- Fully documented API (finally)
- 19 Jupyter notebook tutorials for side-channel analysis with ChipWhisperer
- 5x improved capture speed
- Tutorials all include output with three different targets (Nano, Lite (XMEGA), Lite (STM32F)), making it easier to compare your output to the tutorials output when you are following along.
- Fully usable as a standalone python package
- Project API supports import and export to zip file to move projects around.
An overview of the major changes can be found on the new ReadtheDocs Overview Page.
We highly recommend you switch to CW5 as all development since last year has been for CW5, and will continue this way. The final tagged version of CW4 is 4.0.5, it can be found in the develop branch if you insist.
First time using ChipWhisperer? Check out these links:
- Getting Started if you have no idea where to start
- CW5 Information for information about ChipWhisperer 5 and Jupyter.
- Installing ChipWhisperer if you're trying to set up this software package
Note all development occurs on the develop branch. If you are looking for bleeding edge it's NOT on master - we push each release (and possibly any critical changes) to master. This means that "master" always gives you the latest known-working branch, but there may be new features on the "develop" branch.
Stuck? If you need a hand, there are a few places you can ask for help:
- The NewAE Forum is full of helpful people that can point you in the right direction
- If you find a bug, let us know through the issue tracker
ChipWhisperer is a trademark of NewAE Technology Inc., registered in the US, Europe, and China.