Phototonic emission analysis with Arduino

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi,

Would you say phototonic analysis is feasible using an Arduino bord in order to perform a basic side-channel attack?
One of the few paper on the subject (they're using a controller which must be way to complicated for me to program)

More info:
I'm intersted in this project mainly because there is no tutorial about it, but I'm still too noob to be confident enough and start buying things without knowing what experienced people think. Like, would the output provided by an avalanche photo diode be exploitable without days of circuit making and coding? In other words, would the Arduino-simplicity be conserved or too much unimplemented functions and uncompatible devices would take part?
I'm OK with spending hours working on it but I'd rather work on the "attack" itself (even if it's just trying to have coherent 0 and 1 on screen and not necessarily finding a key) than struggling to get each component responding correctly.

Thanks!

2

I think the hard part would be integration of the APD and the programming of the FPGA to get the timing and binning correct. The tasks done by the Atmrl MCU are of trivial difficulty.

3

No, that research work is cutting edge and very demanding all around. Not only is the apparatus to detect the emitted radiation non-trivial, but it requires a great deal of real-time computation, which they do using an FPGA (programming FPGA's is very hard - when a project mentions using an FPGA, that means they're doing heavy and/or weird computation, and they need to do it fast).

I am absolutely amazed at the amount of information they were able to get out of the infrared radiation that leaks through the opaque case of an IC.