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JCM 2025 Vol.20(6): 724-730
Doi: 10.12720/jcm.20.6.724-730

Algorithm for Combining Acoustic and Electromagnetic Channels to Perform an Attack on RSA Algorithm in the GnuPG Program

Konstantin S. Krasov and Alla B. Levina*
Laboratory of the Fundamental Foundations of Building Intelligent Systems, Saint-Petersburg State Electrotechnical University “LETI” named after V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin), Saint-Petersburg, Russia
Email: iflup@ya.ru (K.S.K.); alla_levina@mail.ru (A.B.L.
*Corresponding author

Manuscript received July 2, 2025; revised August 8, 2025; accepted September 15, 2025; published December 4, 2025.

Abstract—This paper presents a method for accelerating side-channel attacks on the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm implemented in the GnuPG software by jointly analyzing acoustic and Electromagnetic (EM) emissions. A hardware-software experimental setup was developed to investigate the interaction between these two physical leakage channels during RSA-4096 decryption. The study proposes a signal correction technique based on weighted combination of acoustic and EM signals, enhancing the quality of leaked data and reducing the number of iterations required to recover the private key bits. Experimental results obtained under controlled laboratory conditions demonstrate a statistically significant reduction in the average attack time compared to acoustic-only attacks. The results confirm the feasibility of improving side-channel attacks through multimodal signal analysis and highlight the importance of such techniques in evaluating the practical security of cryptographic implementations.


Keywords—side-channel attacks, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) cryptosystem, acoustic signals, electromagnetic signals, voltage regulator module

Cite: Konstantin S. Krasov and Alla B. Levina, “Algorithm for Combining Acoustic and Electromagnetic Channels to Perform an Attack on RSA Algorithm in the GnuPG Program," Journal of Communications, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 724-730, 2025.

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

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