Optical Cryptanalysis: Recovering Cryptographic Keys from Power LED Light Fluctuations

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Title in English Optical Cryptanalysis: Recovering Cryptographic Keys from Power LED Light Fluctuation
Authors

NASSI Ben VAYNER Ofek ILUZ Etay NASSI Dudi JANČÁR Ján GENKIN Daniel TROMER Eran ZADOV Boris ELOVICI Yuval

Year of publication 2023
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'2023)
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Informatics

Citation
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3576915.3616620
Keywords Cryptanalysis; Side-Channel Attack; ECDSA; RSA; SIKE
Description Although power LEDs have been integrated in various devices that perform cryptographic operations for decades, the cryptanalysis risk they pose has not yet been investigated. In this paper, we present optical cryptanalysis, a new form of cryptanalytic side- channel attack, in which secret keys are extracted by using a pho- todiode to measure the light emitted by a device’s power LED and analyzing subtle fluctuations in the light intensity during crypto- graphic operations. We analyze the optical leakage of power LEDs of various consumer devices and the factors that affect the optical SNR. We then demonstrate end-to-end optical cryptanalytic attacks against a range of consumer devices (smartphone, smartcard, and Raspberry Pi, along with their USB peripherals) and recover secret keys (RSA, ECDSA, SIKE) from prior and recent versions of popular cryptographic libraries (GnuPG, Libgcrypt, PQCrypto-SIDH) from a maximum distance of 25 meters.
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