Understanding, Alleviating and Exploiting Electro-Magnetic Side-Channel Signals

Abstract

A side-channel attack is an attack that exploits the low-power electronic signals a device emits even when it’s not connected to the Internet or a network. Such signals can leak sensitive data used in a computational task. Among side channels, the electromagnetic emanations are particularly interesting because they do not require any contact with the target device in order to read potentially sensitive and private data. While side-channel attacks can be conducted without understanding the relationship between computation and electromagnetic emanations, prevention is usually cost-, overhead-, power- and/or weight-intensive. In this talk, I will describe our work to understand the execution-emanations relationship, how this research can be used to "surgically" alleviate side-channel vulnerabilities, and even how it enables new beneficial uses of side-channel information.