Side-Channel Analysis on Mifare Classic
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Chin, Yun
Abstract
Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) poses a serious threat to cryptographic implementa-
tions. By measuring and analyzing the physical characteristics (e.g. timing infor-
mation, power consumption, or electro-magnetic (EM) emanation) of a hardware
device, such attacks can even reveal secret information from implementations of al-
gorithms such as AES and Triple-DES (3DES), for which no e cient analytical or
brute-force attacks exist.
Although SCA has been extensively studied ever since it was proposed, most
publications were conducted focusing on block cipher algorithms such as DES, AES,
and 3DES but few aiming at stream cipher algorithms, which are welcome to con-
tactless smartcards because of their e ciency and low costs of hardware resources.
In addition, most researches require measuring power consumption, which implies
direct contact to the target device. However, for contactless smartcards, such at-
tacks would be invasive (i.e. causing damage to the card) and hence is easy to detect
and to prevent.
With one the smallest hardware footprints among all available cryptographic
algorithms, LFSR-based stream ciphers are one of the promising candidates into
cryptographic primitives. A cipher like this generates key stream by shifting its
LFSR. However, LFSR itself has some features which are susceptible to SCA and
may cause serious security issues to many LFSR-based ciphers.
In this thesis, we present a successful side-channel attack which allows an adver-
sary to extract the secret key of an LFSR-based commercial contactless smartcard in
a way which is non-invasive and hence is undetectable and unpreventable. Moreover,
our attack implies a potential threat to other LFSR-based implementations.
Subjects
SCA
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-101-R98921072-1.pdf
Size
23.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):1d58bc7e80aa7e259a43ab9db22b8dbb