Power analysis attacks on wireless sensor nodes using CPU smart card

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), CPU smart cards can be used as crypto accelerators and temper-resistant storages to improve security. But Side Channel Attacks (SCA) can bypass temper-resistant mechanisms and recover the confidential information without being detected. In this work, a typical black-box Side Channel Attack (SCA) on a real-life 32-Bit CPU smart card against Triple Data Encryption Standard (3DES) is successfully conducted, and the whole 112 key bits of 3DES are recovered with moderate effort which is around 80,000 power traces. Our result highlights that SCA is a practical threat in the security of WSN, and proper countermeasures against SCA should be used.