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.