Abstract
IEEE 802.15.4 is a wireless standard used by a variety of higher-level protocols, including many used in the Internet of Things (IoT). A number of system on a chip (SoC) devices that combine a radio transceiver with a microcontroller are available for use in IEEE 802.15.4 networks. IEEE 802.15.4 supports the use of AES-CCM* for encryption and authentication of messages, and a SoC normally includes an AES accelerator for this purpose. This work measures the leakage characteristics of the AES accelerator on the Atmel ATMega128RFA1, and then demonstrates how this allows recovery of the encryption key from nodes running an IEEE 802.15.4 stack. While this work demonstrates the attack on a specific SoC, the results are also applicable to similar wireless nodes and to protocols built on top of IEEE 802.15.4.
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- 1.
The extended version is published at https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/529.
- 2.
This is not published in [9], but was described in private communication from the author.
- 3.
Note that this 64 MS/s sample rate is successful because the capture hardware samples synchronously with the device clock. If using a regular oscilloscope with an asynchronous timebase we expect a much higher sample rate to be required, similar to that reported in the XMEGA attack.
References
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers at COSADE 2016 for their insightful comments. Colin O’Flynn is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under the CGS program.
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O’Flynn, C., Chen, Z. (2016). Power Analysis Attacks Against IEEE 802.15.4 Nodes. In: Standaert, FX., Oswald, E. (eds) Constructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design. COSADE 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9689. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43283-0_4
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