Threats due To Side Channel Attacks (SCA) in Smartphones

Abstract

Today’s mobile devices contain densely packaged system-on-chips (SoCs) with multi-core, high frequency CPUs and complex pipelines. In parallel, sophisticated SoC-assisted security mechanisms have become commonplace for protecting device data, such as trusted execution environments, full disk and file-based encryption. Both advancements have dramatically complicated the use of conventional physical attacks, requiring the development of specialised attacks Our proposed classification system allows to analyze side-channel attacks systematically, and facilitates the development of novel countermeasures. Besides this new categorization system, the extensive survey of existing attacks and attack strategies provides valuable insights into the evolving field of side-channel attacks, especially when focusing on mobile devices.. Key Words: Side-channel Attack, active, passive