Side-Channel assessment of Open Source Hardware Wallets

Manuel San Pedro; Victor Servant; Charles Guillemet

Paper 2019/401

Side-Channel assessment of Open Source Hardware Wallets

Manuel San Pedro, Victor Servant, and Charles Guillemet

Abstract

Side-channel attacks rely on the fact that the physical behavior of a device depends on the data it manipulates. We show in this paper how to use this class of attacks to break the security of some cryptocurrencies hardware wallets when the attacker is given physical access to them. We mounted two profiled side-channel attacks: the first one extracts the user PIN used through the verification function, and the second one extracts the private signing key from the ECDSA scalar multiplication using a single signature. The results of our study were responsibly disclosed to the manufacturer who patched the PIN vulnerability through a firmware upgrade.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Preprint.
Contact author(s): manuel sanpedro @ ledger fr
History: 2019-04-22: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2019/401
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/401,
      author = {Manuel San Pedro and Victor Servant and Charles Guillemet},
      title = {Side-Channel assessment of Open Source Hardware Wallets},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/401},
      year = {2019},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/401}
}