Applying Thermal Side-Channel Attacks on Asymmetric Cryptography

Journal article (2021)

Authors

A.A.M. Aljuffri King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh, Computer Engineering - EEMCS
Marc Zwalua Student
Cezar Reinbrecht Computer Engineering - EEMCS
S. Hamdioui Quantum & Computer Engineering
M. Taouil Computer Engineering - EEMCS
Research Group
Computer Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2021 A.A.M. Aljuffri, Marc Zwalua, Cezar Reinbrecht, S. Hamdioui, M. Taouil
DOI
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https://doi.org/10.1109/TVLSI.2021.3111407
Power attack Progressive correlation Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) Side-channel attack (SCA) Thermal attack
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Published Date

2021

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Quantum & Computer Engineering

Research Group

Computer Engineering

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.