EM Side-Channel Attacks on Commercial Contactless Smartcards Using Low-Cost Equipment

We introduce low-cost hardware for performing non-invasive side-channel attacks on Radio Frequency Identication Devices (RFID) and develop techniques for facilitating a correlation power analysis (CPA) in the presence of the eld of an RFID reader. We practically verify the eectiveness of the developed methods by analysing the security of commercial contactless smartcards employing strong cryptography, pinpointing weaknesses in the protocol and revealing a vulnerability towards side-channel attacks. Employing the developed hardware, we present the rst successful key-recovery attack on commercially available contactless smartcards based on the Data Encryption Standard (DES) or TripleDES (3DES) cipher that are widely used for security-sensitive applications, e.g., payment purposes.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WISA
• Authors: Timo Kasper, David Oswald, Christof Paar
• Keywords: Contactless Smartcards, Non-invasive Side-channel Attacks, Side-channel Attacks, WISA 2009