Probing Attacks on Tamper-Resistant Devices

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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: CHES
• Authors: Helena Handschuh, Pascal Paillier, Jacques Stern
• Keywords: Adress Bus Bits, CHES 1999, Cryptology, Secret-key Encryption Schemes, Tamper-resistant Cryptographic Hardware