Side-channel attacks try to extract secret information from a system by analyzing different side-channel signatures, such as power consumption, electromagnetic emanation, thermal dissipation, acoustics, time, etc. Power-based side-channel attack is one of the most prominent side-channel attacks in cybersecurity, which rely on data-dependent power variations in a system to extract sensitive information. While there are related surveys, they primarily focus on power side-channel attacks on cryptographic implementations. In recent years, power-side channel attacks have been explored in diverse application domains, including key extraction from cryptographic implementations, reverse engineering of machine learning models, user behavior data exploitation, and instruction-level disassembly. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of power side-channel attacks and their countermeasures in different application domains. Specifically, this survey aims to classify recent power side-channel attacks and provide a comprehensive comparison based on application-specific considerations.
@article{arxiv.2512.23785,
title = {Application-Specific Power Side-Channel Attacks and Countermeasures: A Survey},
author = {Sahan Sanjaya and Aruna Jayasena and Prabhat Mishra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.23785},
year = {2026}
}