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Simple photonic emission analysis of AES

  • CHES 2012
  • Published:
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Abstract

This work presents a novel low-cost optoelectronic setup for time- and spatially resolved analysis of photonic emissions and a corresponding methodology, Simple Photonic Emission Analysis (SPEA). Observing the backside of ICs, the system captures extremly weak photo-emissions from switching transistors and relates them to code running in the chip. SPEA utilizes both spatial and temporal information about these emissions to perform side channel analysis of ICs. We successfully performed SPEA of a proof-of-concept AES implementation and were able to recover the full AES secret key by monitoring accesses to the S-Box. This attack directly exploits the side channel leakage of a single transistor and requires no additional data processing. The system costs and the necessary time for an attack are comparable to power analysis techniques. The presented approach significantly reduces the amount of effort required to perform attacks based on photonic emission analysis and allows AES key recovery in a relevant amount of time. We present practical results for the AVR ATMega328P and the AVR XMega128A1.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge support by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the project PhotonDA through Grant number 01IS10029A and the Helmholtz Research School on Security Technologies. Also, the authors would like to thank our project partners at NXP Semiconductors Germany for their insight and cooperation, the Semiconductor Devices research group at TU Berlin for sample preparation and our colleagues Enrico Dietz, Sven Frohmann, Collin Mulliner and Christoph Bayer for helpful discussions and feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Optical Technologies, Institute of Optics and Atomic Physics, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Alexander Schlösser & Susanna Orlic

  2. Department of Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer Science, Security in Telecommunications, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Dmitry Nedospasov, Juliane Krämer & Jean-Pierre Seifert

Authors
  1. Alexander Schlösser
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  2. Dmitry Nedospasov
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  3. Juliane Krämer
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  4. Susanna Orlic
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  5. Jean-Pierre Seifert
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Correspondence to Alexander Schlösser.

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A. Schlösser and D. Nedospasov equally contributed.

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Schlösser, A., Nedospasov, D., Krämer, J. et al. Simple photonic emission analysis of AES. J Cryptogr Eng 3, 3–15 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13389-013-0053-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13389-013-0053-7

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