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

Cache attacks are known to be sophisticated attacks against cryptographic implementations on desktop computers. Recently, also investigations of such attacks on testbeds with processors that are employed in mobile devices have been done. In this work we investigate the applicability of Bernstein’s [4] timing attack and the cache-collision attack by Bogdanov et al. [6] in real environments on three state-of-the-art mobile devices. These devices are: 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 by Bogdanov et al. [6].