March 19, 2020. Ethan Melvick has been interested in security since he was 12 years old. Now a sophomore in computer engineering at the U, Melvick is part of a lab developing programs that will protect engineer’s systems against cyber-attacks.
Melvick and professor Armin Tajalli’s work targets a specific type of side-channel attacks called “power analysis.” These attacks track the current consumption of a circuit and eventually discover the secret key used in encryption. This is a very common technique that hackers use to easily and quickly decrypt data [Link].