Automated experimental setup for EM cartography to enhance EM attacks

Abstract

Side-channel attacks are a real threat, exploiting and revealing the secret data stored in our electronic devices just analyzing the leaked information of the cryptographic modules during their normal encryption/decryption operations. In this sense, electromagnetic attacks have been posed as one of the most powerful attacks, retrieving the secret information by analyzing the existing relation between the leaked electromagnetic radiation and the data being processed. These attacks are known as ElectroMagnetic (EM) attacks and a extremely critic point for their success is the EM probe positioning. In this paper, an automated experimental setup for EM cartography is described to enhance EM attacks and to help hardware designers to detect the possible information leakage flaws, as well as to determine the security level reached by the hardware implementations against EM attacks.