"For a class, I had to implement a differential power analysis attack, a breakthrough in cryptanalysis as it was the first side-channel attack to be published." <-- Nope. The first published side-channel attack is, to the best of my knowledge, Paul Kocher's "Timing Attacks on Implementations of Diffie-Hellman, RSA, DSS, and Other Systems." (CRYPTO 1996). Approximately at the same time, the Bellcore attack (fault attacks) was made public and presented at Eurocrypt 1997. DPA was only published at CRYPTO 1999.
