Hacking the “unhackable” chips: A side-channel attack on shielded & tamper-resistant hardware 📟🛡️⚡️✍️👨🏻🎓
Security researchers Taiki Kitazawa, Lennert Wouters, Benedikt Gierlichs, Daisuke Fujimoto, Ingrid Verbauwhede, and Yuichi Hayashi present a new electromagnetic side-channel attack - but this time on shielded devices and microcontrollers.
How it works: the attacker deliberately transmits electromagnetic waves toward the protected system and observes how those waves are reflected - for example, through the primary-side power cable of an AC/DC adapter. And it works!
To my understanding, most physically anti-tampered and shielded microcontrollers and systems are vulnerable to this type of attack. Side-channel attacks are coming to hardened SoCs. Yummy!
Now I’ll wait for more interesting research papers and presentations on hardened and anti-tampered systems in the near future. Enjoy the read, and maybe share it with your hardware security people - they should update their threat model.
More details:
Active Electromagnetic Side-Channel Analysis: Crossing Physical Security Boundaries through Impedance Variations [PDF]: https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/12686
