A pre-processing composition for secret key recovery on Android smartphone

Abstract

Simple Side-Channel Analyses (SSCA) are known as techniques to uncover a cryptographic secret from one single spied waveform. Up to now, these very powerful attacks have been illustrated on simple devices which leakage was obvious. On more advanced targets, such as high-end processors of smartphones, a simple visual analysis of the waveforms might not be sufficient to read the secret at once. In this paper, we detail and explain how a composition of time-frequency pre-processings manages to extract the relevant information from one signal capture of an asymmetric cryptographic operation (RSA and ECC) running on an Android system. The lesson is that side-channel countermeasures must be applied even on advanced platforms such as smartphones to prevent secret information theft through the electromagnetic (EM) waveforms. © 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.