Python and PIP
What will this section cover?
We are going to be heavily relying on Python to do most of our measurements. We are also going to do some data analysis using Python. Because of this heavy reliance on Python, we need to install Python along with some packages for it. Two will be mandatory: NumPy and the ChipWhisperer library (which will be covered in ChipWhisperer) and two are optional but very useful: matplotlib which is used for data plotting and TQDM which is used for visual feedback whilst cracking.
Installing Python
The code provided by this walkthrough uses Python 3 and will NOT work on Python 2. Installing Python is a platform dependent workflow. Here are some common operating systems, for other operating systems a simple Google search or a glance at Python.org should do the trick.
Windows
For Windows, download and run the Windows installer from Python.org. For most people the 64-bit version should be the one.
macOS
For macOS, you can either install Python using Homebrew with the following shell command.
brew install python3
Or you can install Python via the macOS Installer. Depending on whether you own an Intel-based macOS device or an ARM-based macOS, you can select the 64-bit Intel or 64-bit universal2 installer, respectively.
Note: Python on macOS tends to give a lot of problems. There is a big chance that Python is already installed or that only Python 2 is installed.
GNU/Linux
For Debian based systems, including Ubuntu, you can use the following commands.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip
For ArchLinux based systems, including Manjaro, you can use the following command.
sudo pacman -S python python-pip
Validating your installation
To check whether your installation was successful, restart your shell and run the following command.
python3 --version
For most installations, this should have also installed pip. We can verify
this with.
pip3 help
Note: If pip is not installing by default when you install Python. A simple google search should do the trick.
NumPy
One of the most common packages used in Python is the NumPy package. We are also going to be using it here to do some data transformations. To install NumPy we can use pip.
pip install numpy
PyPlot
With our data it may be handy to plot our data. Most of the plotting done in this walkthrough has the image attached with it, however. Matplotlib is therefore recommended, but optional. Installing is also via pip.
python -m pip install -U matplotlib
TQDM
To have a better overview of the progress our calculations are making, this walkthrough uses the progress bars from TQDM. This is also optional, but indeed very handy. Installation can be done via pip.
pip install tqdm
Verifying installation of packages
Go into the Python interpreter by running python3 in your shell. We can
verify the installation of all the packages by running the following few
commands:
import numpy
import matplotlib
import tqdm
If none of those three returned an error, everything is installed correctly!
We have now installed Python, PIP and some packages used throughout this walkthrough. We have also verified that everything is properly installed.