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Definition
In a temperature attack, a malicious process leaks information by modulating the device’s temperature. Temperature increase is typically caused by launching intensive computations. Heat differences can be sensed by a variety of means such as the monitoring of fan-speed variations, the reading of disk SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology) attribute 194, catching interrupts caused by Pentium overheat hardware flag set (IA32_THERM_STATUS), or the monitoring of memory faults due to overheating.
The throughput of such covert channels is very low but the leakage of a cryptographic key (a few hundred bits) may suffice to compromise an improperly protected system.
Experimental Results
This attack was implemented on PCs, Smart Cards, Processes, and FPGAs.
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Recommended Reading
Brouchier J, Kean T, Marsh C, Naccache D (Mar–Apr 2009) Temperature attacks. IEEE Security and Privacy 7(2):79–82
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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Naccache, D. (2011). Temperature Attack. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_519
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_519
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