ECDSA Key Extraction from Mobile Devices via Nonintrusive Physical Side Channels

Daniel Genkin; Lev Pachmanov; Itamar Pipman; Eran Tromer; Yuval Yarom

Paper 2016/230

ECDSA Key Extraction from Mobile Devices via Nonintrusive Physical Side Channels

Daniel Genkin, Lev Pachmanov, Itamar Pipman, Eran Tromer, and Yuval Yarom

Abstract

We show that elliptic-curve cryptography implementations on mobile devices are vulnerable to electromagnetic and power side-channel attacks. We demonstrate full extraction of ECDSA secret signing keys from OpenSSL and CoreBitcoin running on iOS devices, and partial key leakage from OpenSSL running on Android and from iOS's CommonCrypto. These non-intrusive attacks use a simple magnetic probe placed in proximity to the device, or a power probe on the phone's USB cable. They use a bandwidth of merely a few hundred kHz, and can be performed cheaply using an audio card and an improvised magnetic probe.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Minor revision. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2016
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978353
Keywords: side-channel attack elliptic curve cryptography electromagnetic analysis power analysis
Contact author(s): tromer @ cs tau ac il
History: 2016-08-19: revised; 2016-03-02: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2016/230
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/230,
      author = {Daniel Genkin and Lev Pachmanov and Itamar Pipman and Eran Tromer and Yuval Yarom},
      title = {{ECDSA} Key Extraction from Mobile Devices via Nonintrusive Physical Side Channels},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2016/230},
      year = {2016},
      doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978353},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/230}
}