Practical Power Analysis Attacks to RSA on a Large IP Portfolio SoC

The RSA algorithm is the most widely used public-key cryptosystem. For this reason it is important to protect RSA-based cryptosystems from the threat of side channels attacks and particularly from power analysis.This article presents the application of power analysis attacks based on real power measurements and describes the main experimental results obtained by attacking software implementations of the RSA algorithm executed on an ARM 926 processor running at 266 MHz. Few practical results of similar type are reported in the literature, and none of them targets a complex SoC running at such a high frequency as that considered in this paper.