Installation

Before installing, grab prerequisites for your platform:

Then install:

Prerequisites

GNU/Linux

Python

On Linux installing Python and the the associated package is straightforward. Typically, you can install them from the package manager (ie. apt-get, yum, …).

On Ubuntu or similar:

sudo apt install python3 python3-pip

Git

If you want the newest PhyWhisperer updates before they make it to release, grab git as well:

sudo apt install git

Packages

There are some packages required for phywhisperer and its dependencies such as pyusb to work. Install using:

sudo apt install libusb-dev make

Hardware Drivers

The driver for Linux is built in; however, you need to allow your user account to access the peripheral.

If you have a recent ChipWhisperer installation, you don’t need to do anything – the hardware driver installation steps you would have done there cover PhyWhisperer as well.

Otherwise, after you’ve installed PhyWhisperer, follow the instructions in drivers/99-newae.rules.

Windows Manual

Python

The recommend method of installing Python is to use a distribution called WinPython. This setup avoids installing Python globally, and includes most of the software you will need. In addition it makes it possible to install 32-bit and 64-bit Python on the same system with minimal problems. This can be very useful as the 64-bit version is handy for doing analysis on large data sets.

To install WinPython 3.7.x, Download a release in the 3.7.x branch from the WinPython site. ChipWhisperer works with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Python.

Choose a reasonable location to install this to - note the default is simply in the download directory. Instead it’s recommended to find a directory such as /WinPython32bit-3.7.1.0, or into your local directory such as c:/Users/yourname/WinPython32bit-3.7.1.0.

Go to your installation directory for WinPython, and run the shortcut called WinPython Command Prompt.exe. This will give you a command prompt which is setup to run Python along with associated scripts.

Optional: You can add the python.exe you just installed to your PATH. To do so navigate to your installation folder, and run the WinPython Control Panel.exe program. Then select Advanced -> Register distribution. If you do not do this, you will have to run all commands in this document via the WinPython Command Prompt.exe. If you plan on running both 32-bit and 64-bit Python, you should not register them. Instead explicitly call the correct Python by always running the WinPython Command Prompt.exe, and then calling specific scripts or notebooks.

Git

If you want the newest PhyWhisperer updates before they make it to release, grab git as well: https://git-scm.com/download/win

Installing Hardware Drivers

On firmware >= 1.1, drivers will be installed automatically upon plugging in your PhyWhisperer to Windows 8 or newer. Otherwise, drivers can be downloaded as a .zip file for Windows. To install them:

  1. Unzip the zip-file somewhere. Also remember where.

  2. Open your Device Manager.

  3. Find the device in the list, it should appear with a yellow exclamation mark under “Other devices”.

  4. Double-click on the device.

  5. Hit “Update Driver”

  6. Select “Browse my computer for driver software”.

  7. Point the wizard to the folder you unzipped, ensure the “look in subfolders” option is selected.

Mac OS X

The Mac OS X instructions are similar to the GNU/Linux once you have brew installed.

Brew

Open your bash terminal and paste this into the prompt:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

This snippet is taken directly from brew’s website. The script will guide you through the installation.

Packages

libusb is required by the chipwhisperer software to communicate with the board. You can install it using brew:

brew install libusb

Python

MacOS’s default outdated Python usually interferes with the desired Python version (Python 3.6 or newer required and 3.7.x recommended). As such, we recommend using pyenv to install Python.

You can get pyenv via brew:

brew install pyenv

From there you can use pyenv to install the desired Python version (3.7.3 in this case):

pyenv install 3.7.3
pyenv global 3.7.3

In addition, you’ll want to add the following lines to your shell’s startup file (usually .bashrc or .zshrc) to ensure that pyenv sets your shell’s path correctly at startup:

if command -v pyenv 1>/dev/null 2>&1; then
    eval "$(pyenv init -)"
fi

Installing PhyWhisperer

You can either grab phywhisperer from pip, which installs the latest full release:

pip install phywhisperer

Or, if you want the latest updates before they make it to a full release, install via git:

git clone https://github.com/newaetech/phywhispererusb
cd phywhispererusb
python setup.py develop