Paper 2023/1068 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2023/1068 ↗
Optical Cryptanalysis: Recovering Cryptographic Keys from Power LED Light Fluctuations
Abstract
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 photodiode to measure the light emitted by a device’s power LED and analyzing subtle fluctuations in the light intensity during cryptographic 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
Metadata
- Available format(s)
PDF- Category
- Attacks and cryptanalysis
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- History
- 2023-07-09: last updated
- 2023-07-09: published
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2023/1068
- License
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1068,
author = {Ben Nassi and Ofek Vayner and Etay Iluz and Dudi Nassi and Or Hai Cohen and Jan Jancar and Daniel Genkin and Eran Tromer and Boris Zadov and Yuval Elovici},
title = {Optical Cryptanalysis: Recovering Cryptographic Keys from Power LED Light Fluctuations},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1068},
year = {2023},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1068}
}