Attackers could use a side-channel attack to break encryptions or signatures by exploiting observable properties of the physical implementation of a cryptosystem. For example, they could use the energy consumption of a microprocessor during cryptographic calculations to draw conclusions about related keys and the operations being carried out. They could also conduct computational timing attacks, microarchitectural attacks, or (semi-) invasive attacks. In 2011, scientists managed to identify the secret key of a TLS/SSL server that was using the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) with elliptic-curve cryptography. The attack was based on the fact that the time required for multiplication makes it possible to draw conclusions about the corresponding operands.