It All Comes Down To Metal and Silicon Sometime — Crypto Side Channel Attacks

I remember, in the UK, we had TV detector vans that patrolled the country and could detect if you were watching the TV. With this they could detect (‘or so they said’) the radiation emitted from a TV. It is this leakage of electromagnetic waves that could give away the TV channel being watched. So, whenever we say that our systems are trustworthy, we must examine them a bit more closely to see that they are not leaking out information through side channels.

Crypto leaks

The security community has produced some wonderful encryption algorithms, which are ultra secure, but eventually, all the bits end up in silicon and metal, and it’s there, increasingly, that an intruder will place monitors in order to crack the keys.

The cracking of encryption keys has often involved brute force methods, or targeting flaws in its implementation. There is, though, increasing interest in physical side-channel attacks where there is an unintentional information leakage of cryptography information, such as from electromagnetic radiation, power consumption, electric voltage fluctuations, and even sound and thermal variations. Few companies currently protect their devices against side channel attacks, especially as it would prove costly, and require extensive testing with…