Attacking Embedded Systems through Power Analysis

Embedded Systems are being used for the development and implementation of Safety and Mission Critical Systems. Malfunctions of such type of embedded systems will lead to disasters at times. The embedded systems must be fully secured from outside intervention in order to have effective functioning as well as to provide protective environment to these mission critical systems. There are several attacking systems discussed in the literature each requiring a kind of counter attacking system. Power Analysis and variations of power analysis are the significant attacking mechanisms discussed in the literature. Crypto servers are the main areas of attacking as they deal with securing the data that flow in-between several components of the embedded systems. Most of the attacking systems suggested in the literature suffer from lack of experimental models to emulate the attacking system. An attacking system could be amply proved when several samples of data are used for attacking and the samples of data provide for knowledge base. In this paper an experimental setup is proposed which is an embedded system by itself for creation of a Knowledge base which shall form the basis for attacking. The experimental setup required for undertaking the actual attacking with the usage of the knowledge base is also presented. Further, the proposed attacking system is applied for mission critical system and the experimental results obtained through the simulation are also presented.