EE Seminar: Simple Photonic Emission Attack with Reduced Data Complexity

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Speaker: Elad Carmon,
M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Avishai Wool

Wednesday, March 16th, 2016 at 15:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

Simple Photonic Emission Attack with Reduced Data Complexity

Abstract

While the phenomena of photonic emission from switching transistors in silicon is actually a very old one, the role of photons in cryptography as a practical side channel source has just recently emerged as a novel research direction and a methodology named simple photonic emission analysis (SPEA) was used to attack AES.
This work proposes substantial algorithmic enhancements to the SPEA method by adding cryptographic post processing, and improved signal processing to the photonic measurement phase. Our improved approach provides three crucial benefits:
1.  For some SBox/SRAM configurations the original SPEA method is unable to identify a unique key, and terminates with up to 2^(48) key candidates; using our new solver we are able to find the correct key regardless of the respective SBox/SRAM configuration.
2. Our methods reduce the number of required (complex photonic) measurements by an order of magnitude, thereby shortening the duration of the attack significantly.
3. Due to the unavailability of the attack equipment we additionally developed a novel Photonic Emission Simulator which we matched against the real equipment of the original SPEA work. With this simulator we were able to verify our enhanced SPEA by a full AES recovery which uses only a small number of photonic measurements.