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International Symposium on Foundations and Practice of Security

FPS 2014: Foundations and Practice of Security pp 17–32Cite as

Location-Dependent EM Leakage of the ATxmega Microcontroller

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8930))

Abstract

Nowadays, low power microcontrollers are widely deployed in wireless sensor networks, also implementing cryptographic algorithms. These implementations are potential targets of so-called side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks which aim to reveal secret information, e.g. a secret key. In this work we evaluate the resistance of AES implementations on an Atmel AVR XMEGA microcontroller against SCA attacks using the electromagnetic (EM) emanation measured at different locations on the chip surface from the front side and the rear side. Results show that the exploitable leakage for correlation attacks of a software implementation is higher compared to the leakage of the AES crypto engine, a hardware accelerator implemented on the microcontroller. Further investigations show that front-side EM measurements lead to better results and the measurement location is crucial if the number of measurements is limited.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the European Commission through the FP7 program under project number 610436 (project MATTHEW).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications (IAIK), Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 16a, 8010, Graz, Austria

    Thomas Korak

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  1. Thomas Korak
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Correspondence to Thomas Korak .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. TELECOM Bretagne, Cesson Sévigné, France

    Frédéric Cuppens

  2. TELECOM SudParis, Evry, France

    Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro

  3. Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Nur Zincir Heywood

  4. University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

    Philip W. L. Fong

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Korak, T. (2015). Location-Dependent EM Leakage of the ATxmega Microcontroller. In: Cuppens, F., Garcia-Alfaro, J., Zincir Heywood, N., Fong, P. (eds) Foundations and Practice of Security. FPS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8930. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17040-4_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17040-4_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17039-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17040-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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