On the Applicability of Time-Driven Cache Attacks on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Cache attacks are known to be sophisticated attacks against cryptographic implementations on desktop computers. Recently, investigations of such attacks on specific testbeds with processors that are employed in mobile devices have been done. In this work we investigate the applicability of Bernstein’s [2] timing attack and the cache-collision attack by Bogdanov ${\textit{et al.}}$ [4] in real environments on three state-of-the-art mobile devices: an Acer Iconia A510, a Google Nexus S, and a Samsung Galaxy SIII. We show that T-table based implementations of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) leak enough timing information on these devices in order to recover parts of the used secret key using Bernstein’s timing attack. We also show that systems with a cache-line size larger than 32 bytes exacerbate the cache-collision attack of Bogdanov ${\textit{et al.}}$ [4].

An extended version of this paper can be found at [11].

This work has been supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant number TRP 251-N23 (Realizing a Secure Internet of Things - ReSIT). Furthermore, it has been supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and the Styrian Business Promotion Agency (SFG) under grant number 836628 (SeCoS).