Probing Attacks on Tamper-Resistant Devices

  • Authors:
  • Helena Handschuh;Pascal Paillier;Jacques Stern

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • CHES '99 Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

This paper describes a new type of attack on tamper-resistant cryptographic hardware. We show that by locally observing the value of a few RAM or adress bus bits (possibly a single one) during the execution of a cryptographic algorithm, typically by the mean of a probe (needle), an attacker could easily recover information on the secret key being used; our attacks apply to public-key cryptosystems such as RSA or El Gamal, as well as to secret-key encryption schemes including DES and RC5.