A side channel attack utilizes information gained from the physical implementation of a cryptosystem. Software and hardware-based systems and methods for preventing side channel attacks are presented. Cryptographic hardware may introduce dummy operations to compensate for conditional math operations in certain functions such as modular exponentiation. Cryptographic hardware may also introduce random stalls of the data path to introduce alterations in the power profile for the operation. A cryptographic function may be mapped to a micro code sequence having a plurality of instructions. Firmware in the cryptosystem may alter the micro code sequence by altering the order of instructions, add dummy operations in the micro code sequence, break the micro code sequence into multiple sub micro code sequences and/or change the register location for source and destination operands used in the sequence. These alterations are designed to randomly change the timing and power profile of the requested function.