A countermeasure for EM attack of a wireless PDA

Future wireless embedded systems will be increasingly powerful, supporting many more applications including one of the most crucial, security. Although many wireless devices offer more resistance to bus probing and power analysis attacks due to their compact size, susceptibility to electromagnetic (EM) attacks must be analyzed. This paper demonstrates, for the first time, a real EM attack on a PDA. A new low energy countermeasure and a new first order differential frequency analysis (DFA) is presented. Real energy measurements are also used to compare the energy overheads of different countermeasures. Results show that the low energy countermeasure thwarts first order differential analysis without large overheads of table regeneration or excessive storage. With the emergence of security applications in PDAs, cellphones, etc., low energy countermeasures for resistance to DFA are crucial for supporting future secure wireless embedded systems.