Power side channel is a very important category of side channels, which can be exploited to steal confidential information from a computing system by analyzing its power consumption. In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of various power side channels on popular mobile devices such as smartphones. Based on unprivileged power consumption traces, we present a list of real-world attacks that can be initiated to identify running apps, infer sensitive UIs, guess password lengths, and estimate geo-locations. These attack examples demonstrate that power consumption traces can be used as a practical side channel to gain various confidential information of mobile apps running on smartphones. Based on these power side channels, we discuss possible exploitations and present a general approach to exploit a power side channel on an Android smartphone, which demonstrates that power side channels pose imminent threats to the security and privacy of mobile users. We also discuss possible countermeasures to mitigate the threats of power side channels.
Power side channels have also been discovered on other systems besides smart-cards. For example, Hlavacs @cite_54 demonstrate that energy consumption side-channel attack can be performed between virtual machines in a cloud.
@cite_54
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Power side channel is a very important category of side channels, which can be exploited to steal confidential information from a computing system by analyzing its power consumption. In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of various power side channels on popular mobile devices such as smartphones. Based on unprivileged power consumption traces, we present a list of real-world attacks that can be initiated to identify running apps, infer sensitive UIs, guess password lengths, and estimate geo-locations. These attack examples demonstrate that power consumption traces can be used as a practical side channel to gain various confidential information of mobile apps running on smartphones. Based on these power side channels, we discuss possible exploitations and present a general approach to exploit a power side channel on an Android smartphone, which demonstrates that power side channels pose imminent threats to the security and privacy of mobile users. We also discuss possible countermeasures to mitigate the threats of power side channels. Side-channel attack is a known security risk to smart cards, and there have been efforts by smart card manufacturers to incorporate side-channel attack countermeasures. In this paper, we study a widely used smart card that uses the 3DES algorithm. First, a platform is setup to extract the power consumption information from the electromagnetic wave. Based on the findings from the initial analysis, we determine that the card is equipped with a “head and tail protection” mechanism. Second, a chosen-plaintext power analysis with a complexity of 216 is proposed, which is designed to recover the second round key from the power leakage in the third round. Then, a slicing-collision-algebraic attack is presented, which decreases the complexity to 26 rapidly. The experiments show that after collecting 20000 power traces (in approximately 200 s), only @math key guesses and another 177 searches (about 300 seconds) are sufficient in recovering the 56-bit source keys of DES successfully. In other words, we demonstrate how the security of the 3DES card can be easily compromised, using side-channel attacks. Finally, we recommend that the head and tail protection should extend to the first and last four rounds, at the minimal, in order to be side-channel attack resilience. The high-performance and energy-efficient encryption engines have emerged as a key component for modern System-On-Chip (SoC) in various platforms including servers, desktops, mobile, and IoT edge devices. A key bottleneck to secure operation of encryption engines is leakage of information through various side-channels. For example, an adversary can extract the secret key by performing statistical analysis on measured power and electromagnetic (EM) emission signatures generated by the hardware during encryption. Countermeasures to such side-channel attacks often come at high power, area, or performance overheads. Therefore, design of side-channel secure encryption engines is a critical challenge for high-performance and or power- energy efficient operations. This paper reviews that although low-power requirement imposes critical challenge for side-channel security, but circuit techniques traditionally developed for power management also present new opportunities for side-channel resistance. As a case study, we review the feasibility of using integrated voltage regulator and dynamic voltage frequency scaling normally used for efficient power management, for increasing power-side-channel resistance of AES engines. The hardware measurement results from test-chip fabricated in 130nm process are presented to demonstrate the impact of power management circuits on side-channel security. This paper examines how monitoring power consumption signals might breach smart-card security. Both simple power analysis and differential power analysis attacks are investigated. The theory behind these attacks is reviewed. Then, we concentrate on showing how power analysis theory can be applied to attack an actual smart card. We examine the noise characteristics of the power signals and develop an approach to model the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We show how this SNR can be significantly improved using a multiple-bit attack. Experimental results against a smart-card implementation of the Data Encryption Standard demonstrate the effectiveness of our multiple-bit attack. Potential countermeasures to these attacks are also discussed.