A New Approach of Electromagnetic Template Attack on Cipher Chips
Biao Liu, Gao Yougang, Huamin Feng, Kejun Zhang · International Conference on Electronics, Communications and Control · 2012
Side Channel Analysis is a technique that extracts information from digital hardware. Quickly characterizing, analyzing and extracting information from the unintended electromagnetic emissions of cryptographic systems is important in the intelligence community because many methods used are time consuming and computationally intensive. A new approach to achieve such a purpose is proposed to extract encryption keys from cipher chips performing DES encryptions by passively monitoring and exploiting unintentional electromagnetic emissions. It is similar to traditional template attacks with three notable exceptions. First, it directly targets the encryption key instead of algorithmic permutations the encryption key. Second, it creates templates from single key-bit rather than multiple key bits. Third, it does not require any cryptographic knowledge about the training and test traces, such as the plaintext or cipher text used in the creation of them. Our promising results regarding the DES encryption scheme confirms the effectiveness of the approach in cryptanalysis.