Side-channel attacks (SCA) present a major threat to secure embedded systems. Effective software countermeasures against SCA are well known in theory, but in practice are difficult to implement properly due to issues such as unexpected compiler transformations and/or platform-specific leakage sources. Although several recent examples from industry and academia show that SCA is becoming increasingly simple and inexpensive to perform as an attacker, evaluating the security of a system against SCA can still be expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, most evaluation techniques must be performed near the end of the development schedule which adds significant risk. In this talk, I'll explain SCA and discuss some of the challenges to properly protecting against this threat. I'll introduce some of MITRE's research in this area and describe some related projects that MITRE interns have participated in. Time permitting, I will touch on other research areas as well and talk about what it's like to work at MITRE.