Side-Channel Attacks on the Mobile Phones: Applicability and Improvements

Abstract

On one hand, side-channel attacks are a powerful approach to cryptoanalysis, on the other hand, these attacks have a very specific attacker model. As a result, a practical application of SCA is sometimes disputable. The threat level in each case has to be evaluated given individual features of a certain target system. Endpoint client applications like mobile phone applications are especially vulnerable because of an uncomplicated access to the device. More attention has to be paid to their security since they’re more accessible to an attacker and usually carry a large amount of sensitive information. Current research represents the informativity assessment of the side-channel signals obtained from mobile phones. Low-priced accessible equipment was used in order to decrease requirements to an attacker level and consequently increase the applicability of an attack. Logically, it results in a lack of information that can be obtained from such traces, but there are ways to achieve a good interpretation of the signal. For staying within the consumer-segment equipment, the algorithmic approach increasing traces informativity was implemented. The algorithm is Normalized Inter-Class Variance and it allows to distinctly improve the efficiency of trace analysis by reducing the number of points and increasing of the quality of reference traces.