Abstract:The I-cache timing attack which exploits the instruction path of a cipher is one type of side channel attack. First, by analyzing the complications in the previous I-cache timing attacks on RSA algorithm because of how hard it has been to put them into practice, and how the number of the inferred bits is insufficient, this paper builds a new trace driven I-cache timing attack model via spying on the whole I-cache, instead targeting the instruction cache to which the special function mapped. Next, an improved analysis algorithm of the exponent based on the characteristic of the side of window in sliding window exponentiation (SWE) algorithm is proposed. Finally, an I-cache timing attack is implemented on RSA of OpenSSL v.0.9.8f in a practical environment, using a simultaneous multithreading processor to insure that the spy process and the cipher process can run in parallel. Experimental results show that the proposed attack model has strong applicability in real environments; the improved analysis algorithm of the exponent can further reduce the search space of the bits of the key, and improve the effectively of the trace driven I-cache timing attack. For a 512-bit exponent, it can recover about 50 bits of exponent more than the previous.