Applying Thermal Side-Channel Attacks on Asymmetric Cryptography
Abdullah Aljuffri (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh)
Marc Zwalua (Student TU Delft)
Cezar Rodolfo Wedig Reinbrecht (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Said Hamdioui (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Mottaqiallah Taouil (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
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Abstract
Side-channel attacks (SCAs) are powerful attacks that could be used to retrieve keys from electronic devices. Several physical leakage sources can be exploited in SCAs, such as power, time, heat, and so on. Heat is one of the side-channels that is not frequently analyzed by attackers in the literature due to the high noise associated with thermal traces. This article investigates the practicality of adapting power-based SCAs [i.e., correlation power analysis (CPA) and deep-learning-based power attacks (DL-based PA)] for thermal attacks and refer to them as correlation thermal attack (CTA) and DL-based thermal attack (DL-based TA). In addition, we introduce a new attack called progressive CTA (PCTA). We evaluate the different thermal SCAs against an unprotected and protected software implementation of Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA). Our results show the practicality of the three attacks (i.e. CTA, DL-based TA, and PCTA) as a 100% key recovery is realized.