Practical results of EM cartography on a FPGA-based RSA hardware implementation

Abstract

Side channel attack is a powerful technique to extracting secret key from cryptographic applications of embedded systems. Best results are obtained by placing a small electromagnetic probe just over areas of an integrated circuit which are leaking the most information. To find such locations, some cartography methods have been proposed in the past, but never used against asymmetric-key cryptosystems. In this paper, we target such cryptosystem, more precisely a FPGA-based RSA hardware implementation. We show that these methods are effective to locate the RSA cryptoprocessor.