Validation of differential light emission analysis on FPGA

Failure analysis tools and methods can be used for security purposes as well as the security attack techniques can be used in failure analysis. In this paper, we describe the last results obtained concerning light emission techniques and their use to set up a side channel methodology. From a cryptanalyst standpoint, the light emission could be a potential source of leakage. When studying a specific cipher algorithm implemented in a device, by analysing this new kind of leakage it is possible to retrieve secret sensitive data. We made our analyses on an FPGA device, which makes the attack harder to perform than on a standard ASIC. Furthermore, the technique was validated on a device in 0.13µm technology, resulting in a more complex sample preparation from backside. We will show that, the leakage due to the light emitted during normal operation of a CMOS circuit, can be used to set up an attack based on the well-known DPA technique.