[Resource Topic] 2015/170: Stealing Keys from PCs using a Radio: Cheap Electromagnetic Attacks on Windowed Exponentiation

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Title:
Stealing Keys from PCs using a Radio: Cheap Electromagnetic Attacks on Windowed Exponentiation

Authors: Daniel Genkin, Lev Pachmanov, Itamar Pipman, Eran Tromer

Abstract:

We present new side-channel attacks on RSA and ElGamal implementations that use the popular sliding-window or fixed-window (m-ary) modular exponentiation algorithms. The attacks can extract decryption keys using a very low measurement bandwidth (a frequency band of less than 100 kHz around a carrier under 2 MHz) even when attacking multi-GHz CPUs. We demonstrate the attacks’ feasibility by extracting keys from GnuPG, in a few seconds, using a nonintrusive measurement of electromagnetic emanations from laptop computers. The measurement equipment is cheap and compact, uses readily-available components (a Software Defined Radio USB dongle or a consumer-grade radio receiver), and can operate untethered while concealed, e.g., inside pita bread. The attacks use a few non-adaptive chosen ciphertexts, crafted so that whenever the decryption routine encounters particular bit patterns in the secret key, intermediate values occur with a special structure that causes observable fluctuations in the electromagnetic field. Through suitable signal processing and cryptanalysis, the bit patterns and eventually the whole secret key are recovered.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/170

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