Learning from Electromagnetic Emanations | A Case Study for iMDPL

Ecient countermeasures against side-channel attacks are vital for security-related devices. This is because power-measurements can be carried out at relatively low costs by an adversary that has phys- ical access to the device. In a lot of applications, e.g. pay-TV, the ability of cloning a single device leads already to a signicant problem ( i.e. monetary loss) for the issuer of the device. While the knowledge that a device leaks information is already impor- tant, a detailed image about the nature of the security hole would help the designer to improve the product. In this paper, we analyze the electromagnetic emanations of the secure logic style iMDPL. We measured the emanations by stepping with an EM probe over an ASIC prototype chip produced in a 180nm CMOS process technology. By means of data dependency images for each point in time during the computation we deeply investigate security related issues of iMDPL and show that certain data ows within a design can be traced with this technique.