Crypto-Protector: Multi-threaded RSA to Prevent EM Attacks

The cryptographic algorithm executed in the embedded or smart devices can be attacked by non-invasive EM attacks extracting the secret keys. The EM attacks can be performed based on either simple power analysis or statistical analysis methods depending on the implementation design. What is important here is that it is costly to re-implement and update the widely used cryptographic library whenever new weaknesses in the implementation are reported. In this paper, we propose a cryptographic module independent method, aptly named Crypto-Protector, for protecting against EM attacks. By executing multithreaded operations with some decoy keys, Crypto-Protector provides a disalignment effect of EM traces.