Faster frame rate detection in electromagnetic side-channel attacks
Fast Frame Rate Estimation in Electromagnetic Side-Channel Attacks on Public Systems
Cryptography and SecurityComputers and Society
Summary
Estimating how fast a screen refreshes is an important step for certain electronic spying methods that listen to weak electromagnetic signals leaked by devices. The usual method takes more time as the signal gets longer. The authors show a way to speed up this estimation by using what is already known about the device's screen size, cutting down the work needed while keeping accuracy. They tested this using special radio equipment on a voting machine model and got good results.
What this means in practice
- •For electronic voting security teams: Help analyze risks of electromagnetic leaks by quickly identifying display refresh rates in voting machines to improve security assessments.
- •For embedded systems engineers: Speed up side-channel attack analysis on devices with known display settings by reducing frame rate estimation complexity.
Authors
Alyson Isaluski, Leonardo Teodoro, Kleber V. Cardoso, Antonio Oliveira-Jr, Saulo Queiroz
Abstract
Frame refresh rate estimation is a fundamental step in identifying compromising harmonic frequencies in electromagnetic side-channel attacks. Methods based on discrete linear autocorrelation (DLA) are robust across different scenarios and require a computational complexity of $O(N\log N)$ for a signal containing $N$ samples. This work proposes reducing this complexity to $O(N)$ by exploiting prior knowledge of the target system's display resolution, as is available for certain models of the Brazilian electronic voting machine. Experiments using software-defined radios show that the proposed method preserves the accuracy of the conventional approach in the evaluated scenarios.