Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2015/561

SoC it to EM: electromagnetic side-channel attacks on a complex system-on-chip

J. Longo and E. De Mulder and D. Page and M. Tunstall

Abstract: Increased complexity in modern embedded systems has presented various important challenges with regard to side-channel attacks. In particular, it is common to deploy SoC-based target devices with high clock frequencies in security-critical scenarios; understanding how such features align with techniques more often deployed against simpler devices is vital from both destructive (i.e., attack) and constructive (i.e., evaluation and/or countermeasure) perspectives. In this paper, we investigate electromagnetic-based leakage from three different means of executing cryptographic workloads (including the general purpose ARM core, an on-chip co-processor, and the NEON core) on the AM335x SoC. Our conclusion is that addressing challenges of the type above {\em is} feasible, and that key recovery attacks can be conducted with modest resources.

Category / Keywords: side-channel, electromagnetic, system-on-chip, ARM, NEON

Original Publication (in the same form): IACR-CHES-2015

Date: received 7 Jun 2015, last revised 22 Jun 2015

Contact author: jake longo at bristol ac uk

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: FULL VERSION (fixed typo).

Version: 20150622:090113 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2015/561

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