Electromagnetic side-channel attack on aes using low-end equipment

Abstract

Side-channel attacks on cryptographic algorithms targets the implementation of the algorithm. Information can leak from the implementation in several different ways and, in this paper, electromagnetic radiation from an FPGA is considered. We examine to which extent key information from an AES implementation can be deduced using a low-end oscil-loscope. Moreover, we examine how the antenna’s distance from the FPGA affects the results in this setting. Our experiments show that some key bits in-deed can be inferred from the measurements, despite having a far from optimal setting.