  The threats of physical side-channel attacks and their countermeasures have
been widely researched. Most physical side-channel attacks rely on the
unavoidable influence of computation or storage on current consumption or
voltage drop on a chip. Such data-dependent influence can be exploited by, for
instance, power or electromagnetic analysis. In this work, we introduce a novel
non-invasive physical side-channel attack, which exploits the data-dependent
changes in the impedance of the chip. Our attack relies on the fact that the
temporarily stored contents in registers alter the physical characteristics of
the circuit, which results in changes in the die's impedance. To sense such
impedance variations, we deploy a well-known RF/microwave method called
scattering parameter analysis, in which we inject sine wave signals with high
frequencies into the system's power distribution network (PDN) and measure the
echo of the signals. We demonstrate that according to the content bits and
physical location of a register, the reflected signal is modulated differently
at various frequency points enabling the simultaneous and independent probing
of individual registers. Such side-channel leakage challenges the $t$-probing
security model assumption used in masking, which is a prominent side-channel
countermeasure. To validate our claims, we mount non-profiled and profiled
impedance analysis attacks on hardware implementations of unprotected and
high-order masked AES. We show that in the case of the profiled attack, only a
single trace is required to recover the secret key. Finally, we discuss how a
specific class of hiding countermeasures might be effective against impedance
leakage.
