International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 02 March 2016

Daniel Genkin, Lev Pachmanov, Itamar Pipman, Eran Tromer, Yuval Yarom
ePrint Report ePrint Report
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.
Expand

Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.