Pankaj Rohatgi
More info
- Affiliation
- IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Cryptography Research (Rambus)
- Known for
- Template attacks, electromagnetic side channels, masking
IBM side-channel researcher who co-authored both the template attack and the systematic study of electromagnetic leakage — in the same year.
Once Paul Kocher had shown that power consumption leaks keys, a group at IBM's Watson lab set about the theory of stopping it. Rohatgi was on the CRYPTO 1999 paper with Suresh Chari, Charanjit Jutla and Josyula Rao that put masking on a formal footing: split secret values into random shares so that any single measurement is just noise.
At CHES 2002 he co-authored two papers that pushed the field from the other side. One introduced the template attack; the other mapped how chips leak through electromagnetic emanations and not just through the power rail. He later joined Kocher's company Cryptography Research, where the countermeasures became a product.