Forensic insights from smartphones through electromagnetic side-channel analysis

Abstract

The increasing use of smartphones has increased their presence in legal and corporate investigations. Unlike desktop and laptop computers, forensic analysis of smartphones is a challenging task due to their limited interfaces to retrieve information of forensic value. Electromagnetic side-channel analysis (EM-SCA) has been recently proposed as an alternative window to acquire forensic insights from computers, in particularly from Internet of Things devices. Along this line, this work experimentally evaluates the potential of extracting information of forensic value from smartphones through their EM radiation. Initially, a group of smartphones representing a diverse set of system-on-chip (SoC) processors were used to acquire EM radiation traces. Later, deep learning models were trained to detect various internal software behaviours running on the SoCs. The results of this work indicates that a wide variety of insights can be extracted from smartphones through EM side-channel, increasing the potential opportunities for digital forensic investigators.