Side-Channel Attack: Electromagnetic Leakage Attacks

Threat actors can leverage electromagnetic emanations to obtain sensitive information. The electromagnetic radiations attain importance when they are hardware generated emissions, especially emissions from the cryptographic module. Electromagnetic leakage attacks have been shown to be more successful than power analysis attacks on chicards. If proper protections are not in place on the spacecraft, the circuitry is exposed and hence leads to stronger emanations of EM radiations. If the circuitry is exposed, it provides an easier environment to study the electromagnetic emanations from each individual component.

ID: EXF-0002.02
Sub-technique of:  EXF-0002
Notional Risk (H | M | L):  14 | 9 | 9
Related Aerospace Threat IDs:  SV-AC-5 | SV-CF-1 | SV-CF-2
Related MITRE ATT&CK TTPs: 
Related ESA SPACE-SHIELD TTPs:  T2035
Tactic:
Created: 2022/10/19
Last Modified: 2024/02/29

Countermeasures

ID Name Description NIST Rev5 D3FEND ISO 27001
CM0003 TEMPEST The spacecraft should protect system components, associated data communications, and communication buses in accordance with TEMPEST controls to prevent side channel / proximity attacks. Encompass the spacecraft critical components with a casing/shielding so as to prevent access to the individual critical components. PE-19 PE-19(1) PE-21 SC-8(3) D3-PH D3-RFS A.7.5 A.7.8 A.8.12
CM0050 On-board Message Encryption In addition to authentication on-board the spacecraft bus, encryption is also recommended to protect the confidentiality of the data traversing the bus. AC-4 AC-4(23) AC-4(24) AC-4(26) AC-4(31) AC-4(32) PL-8 PL-8(1) SA-3 SA-8 SA-8(18) SA-8(19) SA-8(9) SA-9(6) SC-13 SC-16 SC-16(1) SC-16(2) SC-16(3) SC-8(1) SC-8(3) SI-19(4) SI-4(10) SI-4(25) D3-MH D3-MENCR D3-ET A.5.14 A.8.22 A.8.23 A.8.11 A.5.8 A.5.2 A.5.8 A.8.25 A.8.31 A.8.27 A.8.28 A.5.33 A.8.24 A.8.26 A.5.31 A.8.11
CM0060 Secret Shares Use of secret shares in which the original computation is divided probabilistically such that the power subset of shares is statistically independent. One of the major drawbacks of this solution is the increase in the power consumption due to the number of operations that are almost doubled. PE-19 PE-19(1) D3-PH D3-RFS A.7.5 A.7.8 A.8.12
CM0061 Power Masking Masking is a scheme in which the intermediate variable is not dependent on an easily accessible subset of secret key. This results in making it impossible to deduce the secret key with partial information gathered through electromagnetic leakage. PE-19 PE-19(1) D3-PH D3-RFS A.7.5 A.7.8 A.8.12

References