Intentional electromagnetic interference for fault analysis on AES block cipher IC

This paper presents a new type of intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI) which causes information leakage from cryptographic ICs (Integrated Circuits). As a recent threat, it is known that faults in cryptographic ICs such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) have significant influence on leakage of sensitive information. AES is a block cipher standardized by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States) that is a de-facto standard of smart card ICs and used for many security devices. In order to guarantee the tamper-resistance of AES hardware, this paper discusses the potential vulnerability against faults induced by IEMI via power cables. The contribution of the paper is twofold. (1) We find that, different from previous work of fault analysis, the electromagnetic (EM) faults from power cables are remotely-controllable and lead to the leakage of the secret key. (2) We show that the random EM faults can be managed with reasonable amount of measurements and its risk to the key leakage is high enough to be a real-life threat.