In the first part of this talk, I will present results of a systematic investigation of leakage of compromising information via electromagnetic (EM) emanations from CMOS based devices. This information leakage differs substantially from and is more powerful than leakage from other conventional side-channels such as timing and power. EM emanations are shown to consist of a multiplicity of compromising signals, each leaking somewhat different information. Our experimental results confirm that some of these signals could individually contain enough leakage to defeat countermeasures against other side- channels such as power. In the second part of this talk, I will present a new form of side channel attacks which we call template attacks. These attacks can break implementations and countermeasures whose security is dependent on the assumption that an adversary cannot obtain more than one or a limited number of side channel samples. They require that an adversary has access to an identical experimental device that he can program to his choosing. In contrast to previous approaches which viewed noise as a hindrance that had to be reduced or eliminated, our approach focuses on precisely modeling noise, and using this to fully extract information present in a single sample. I will present a case study where we use this approach to extract keys from an implementation of RC4.
Bio:
J.R. Rao leads the Internet Security group at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992. His research interests include programming methodology, distributed systems, network security and applied cryptography. Dr. Rao is a member of IFIP's Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology.
Seminar, 17 September 2002