I've asked this question here and was advised to post this question on this forum in hopes of an answer.
I'm currently taking a security class and i came into this issue when writing a report about side channel attacks. When reading about electromagnetic attacks, more specifically about Simple Electromagnetic Analysis in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_attack), it states:
It is very effective against asymmetric cryptography implementations...
I understand why it is effective agaisnt an algorithm such as RSA, which is asymmetric, but doesn't the reason for its effectiveness resides on the way the algorithm is implemented and not if its symmetric or asymmetric cryptography?
For example, a common attack on asymmetric RSA relies on the fact that the encryption steps rely on the value of the key bits. Every bit is processed with a square operation and then a multiplication operation if and only if the bit is equal to 1. An attacker with a clear trace can deduce the key simply by observing where the multiplication operations are performed.
So i don't really understand why it says its effective against asymmetric cryptography.
Thanks for your attention!