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A cheap device can intercept encryption keys | Cyberops

A cheap device can intercept encryption keys

By Prempal Singh 0 Comment June 27, 2017

Fox-IT company’s specialists have developed a way to side-channel attack, which allows using inexpensive equipment to intercept the AES-256 encryption key from a distance of 1 m.

Using the available ready-made electronic components worth $ 224, experts were able to fix the electromagnetic radiation of the attacked computer and just five minutes to intercept the encryption key. Bringing equipment to a distance of 30 cm, the researchers were able to reduce this time to 50 seconds.

Used to attack the equipment is attached to the external loop antenna amplifier and band-pass filters are connected to the USB-flash drive with software for radio. Assembled together, the device is a very compact and can easily be hidden in a jacket pocket or laptop bag.

The device is capable of recording signals generated by power consumption attacked SmartFusion2 system based on ARM Cortex-M3 processor. By measuring the leakage between the processor and the high-speed bus (AHB) experts could associate with a power consumption level of the encryption process and eventually get the key. In the study, experts have identified as the level of power consumption is correlated with each byte of information at different encryption processes.

As explained by experts, while getting the key is reduced if the unit closer to the target computer. This is because the distance from the radio system are weakening. This technique can be improved by using more expensive equipment.

Loop antenna – directional antenna is made in the form of one or several flat windings wires forming a frame round, square or rectangular.

The band-pass filter – filter passing frequencies in a frequency band. It is a linear system and can be represented as a sequence consisting of a lowpass filter and a highpass filter.

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