Power Analysis Attacks Against IEEE 802.15.4 Nodes

Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9689)

Abstract

IEEE 802.15.4 is a wireless standard used by a variety of higher-level protocols, including many used in the Internet of Things (IoT). A number of system on a chip (SoC) devices that combine a radio transceiver with a microcontroller are available for use in IEEE 802.15.4 networks. IEEE 802.15.4 supports the use of AES-CCM* for encryption and authentication of messages, and a SoC normally includes an AES accelerator for this purpose. This work measures the leakage characteristics of the AES accelerator on the Atmel ATMega128RFA1, and then demonstrates how this allows recovery of the encryption key from nodes running an IEEE 802.15.4 stack. While this work demonstrates the attack on a specific SoC, the results are also applicable to similar wireless nodes and to protocols built on top of IEEE 802.15.4.

Keywords

AES Side-channel power analysis DPA IEEE 802.15.4 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers at COSADE 2016 for their insightful comments. Colin O’Flynn is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under the CGS program.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Dalhousie UniversityHalifaxCanada

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