SCNIFFER: Low-Cost, Automated, Efficient Electromagnetic Side-Channel Sniffing

Abstract

Electromagnetic (EM) side-channel analysis (SCA) is a prominent tool to break mathematically-secure cryptographic engines, especially on resource-constrained devices. Presently, to perform EM SCA on an embedded device, the entire chip is manually scanned and the MTD (Minimum Traces to Disclosure) analysis is performed at each point on the chip to reveal the secret key of the encryption algorithm. However, an automated end-to-end framework for EM leakage localization, trace acquisition, and the attack has been missing. This work proposes SCNIFFER: a low-cost, automated EM Side-Channel leakage SNIFFing platform to perform efficient end-to-end Side-Channel attacks. Using a leakage measure such as Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA), or the signal to noise ratio (SNR), we propose a greedy gradient-search heuristic that converges to one of the points of highest EM leakage on the chip (dimension: N × N) within O(N) iterations, and then perform Correlational EM Analysis (CEMA) at that point. This reduces the CEMA attack time by ∼ N times compared to an exhaustive MTD analysis, and by > 20× compared to choosing an attack location at random. We demonstrate SCNIFFER using a low-cost custombuilt 3-D scanner with an H-field probe (< $500) compared to > $50, 000 commercial EM scanners, and a variety of microcontrollers as the devices under attack. The SCNIFFER framework is evaluated for several cryptographic algorithms (AES-128, DES, RSA) running on both an 8-bit Atmega microcontroller and a 32-bit ARM microcontroller to find a point of high leakage and then perform a CEMA at that point.

Electromagnetic and Power Side-Channel Analysis: Advanced Attacks and Low-Overhead Generic Countermeasures through White-Box Approach

“…However, an automated end-to-end framework for EM leakage localization, trace acquisition and the attack has been missing. Recently, we proposed SCNIFFER, which is a low-cost, automated EM side-channel leakage sniffing platform to perform efficient end-to-end side-channel attacks [32]. Using a leakage measure such as test vector leakage assessment (TVLA), or the signal to noise ratio (SNR), we propose a greedy gradient-search heuristic that converges to one of the points of highest EM leakage on the chip (dimension: N × N) within O(N) iterations, and then performs correlational EM analysis (CEMA) at that point (Figure 9a).…”

“…Using a leakage measure such as test vector leakage assessment (TVLA), or the signal to noise ratio (SNR), we propose a greedy gradient-search heuristic that converges to one of the points of highest EM leakage on the chip (dimension: N × N) within O(N) iterations, and then performs correlational EM analysis (CEMA) at that point (Figure 9a). This reduces the CEMA attack time by ∼N times compared to an exhaustive MTD analysis, and by >20× compared to choosing an attack location at random [32].…”

“…Converge to of High Leakage point using SCNIFFER framework through SNR analysis and an intelligent gradient search algorithm, and then perform an EM SCA attack at that point a) b) Figure 9. (a) SCNIFFER integrates the EM scanning, trace collection, intelligent fast localization and attack together, to enable an end-to-end EM SCA framework [32]. (b) Implementation of the low-cost SCNIFFER system with the 3D EM scanner, H-probe, amplifier, target device and chipwhisperer system for the trace capture.…”

“…Once the best leakage point on the chip is found, SCNIFFER uses CEMA to perform the EM SCA attack to recover the correct key. (b) SCNIFFER with SNR/TVLA-based intelligent gradient search shows a ∼100× reduction in the number of traces required for the end-to-end attack compared to the exhaustive search[32].…”

Electromagnetic Side-Channel Analysis for IoT Forensics: Challenges, Framework, and Datasets

“…In order to perform EM-SCA for acquiring forensic insights from a particular IoT device or a smartphone, the EM radiation patterns of the target device have to be profiled and incorporated into EM-SCA methods. The profiling of a particular device starts with the required specialised hardware, including DUTs and data acquisition equipment [7]. The actual work on developing the EM-SCA technique for analysing EM data of the particular DUT comes as the second step.…”