ElectroMagnetic analysis (EMA) of software AES on Java mobile phones

Abstract

Abstract-Smartphones, whose market share has increased by 54% between 2009 and 2010, is one of the favored platform for "Convergence Computing". Convergence Computing is a technology in which a single device can provide various services without any restrictions from external devices or networks. Today, smartphones as convergent single device have diverse functions and features such as calling, Internet surfing, game playing, banking, storage of personal and professional data, etc. Some of these use encryption algorithms such as AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). For example, this algorithm is used to authenticate server protocols or to encrypt confidential information. This paper shows that an Electromagnetic Analysis (EMA) on AES is possible on a Java mobile phone to extract secret keys. The latter can then be used for forensic purposes or to recover encrypted data stored in the device. Experiments involving two successful approaches are described and compared : Spectral Density based Approach (SDA) and Template based Resynchronisation Approach (TRA).

ECDSA Key Extraction from Mobile Devices via Nonintrusive Physical Side Channels

“…Starting with iOS 9, Com-monCrypto uses a new EC implementation, including sidechannel mitigation techniques such as operand-independent control flow and Montgomery-ladder multiplication. 5 Our current attacks are not applicable to this new EC implementation, and we have no evidence that it is vulnerable. CoreBitcoin.…”

“…Key-Extraction Side-Channel Attacks on Phones. High bandwidth electromagnetic attacks (sampling at clockrate speeds) on symmetric ciphers were demonstrated by Aboulkassimi et al [5] on Java-based feature-phones. Attacks at clock-rate frequencies on public key cryptography were also recently demonstrated by Goller and Sigl [33] on Android smartphones running a naive square-and-sometimesmultiply RSA, with the phone's shielding plate often removed.…”

Comparison of side-channel leakage on Rich and Trusted Execution Environments

“…Attacks were performed in the last few years on advanced system. In [8], Aboulkassimi et al attacked a software implementation of AES under JAVA ME using EM measures. In [9], Longo et al added an OS and attacked a SoC running under Debian to extract AES encryption key exploiting electro-1 https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3304080.3304084 Authors' version Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Cryptography and Security in Computing Systems CS2 2019 magnetic emanations.…”

Developing an Electromagnetic Noise Generator to Protect a Raspberry PI from Side Channel Analysis

“…Aboulkassimi et al [29] performed an EM attack on symmetric ciphers by capturing signals at the device clock rate on a Java based cellphone. However, they placed a MicroSD extension cable to the MicroSD card to extract EM information.…”

“…In addition, the research in [34] recently demonstrated the ability to recover partial (12 out of the 16 subkeys) AES-128 cryptographic keys from a Raspberry Pi. As it is a new field the research [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] has followed attacks introduced by targeting smartcards, RFID tags, FPGAs and microcontrollers. However, each attack against these higher frequency devices had different approaches with regards to recovery EM information and applying digital filtering techniques to recover sensitive information.…”