ERI: EMRadar: A Practical Sensing System on the Electromagnetic Side-Channel of IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized daily life, yet securing IoT devices remains a significant challenge due to limited resources on IoT devices and the lack of visibility into their internal operations once deployed. Unlike conventional side-channel vulnerabilities, the electromagnetic (EM) side-channel emission leaks information over wireless channel, offering a unique medium to investigate IoT security without accessing or instrumenting the device.

Unfortunately, current research on the EM side-channel attacks of IoT devices has been severely limited by the lack of a practical sensing system that can extract weak EM signals emitted by computer processors or memories, separate those EM signals of co-located devices, and robustly unravel their semantics. To tackle these challenges, this project will design, implement, and evaluate a practical EM sensing system named EMRadar to enable research on EM side-channel attacks and defenses in real environments.

The results of this project will deepen our understanding of EM side-channel attacks and inform emission security standards. Practical EM side-channel defenses enabled by this project will transform various security-critical IoT applications, including detecting program deviations in medical devices that are highly resource-constrained, such as the implantable cardiac devices and the smart insulin pumps.

The project is dedicated to fostering diversity and inclusion in STEM by blending research with education and outreach activities. The PI will actively involve local high school students by providing hands-on activities and presentations elucidating fundamental concepts of IoT technologies and cybersecurity. To bridge the gap in STEM participation, the project will engage students from underrepresented minority groups in Detroit and Pontiac as well as various Michigan-based organizations for girls.

This endeavor is supported by collaborations with the Oakland University's STEM summer camps and field trips, as well as the Michigan Aspirations in Computing Committee. Through these initiatives, the project will inspire a broad spectrum of students to pursue futures in engineering and science.

This project will design, implement, and evaluate the EMRadar, a practical EM sensing system that enables research on EM side-channel attacks and defenses in realistic environments. The proposed research will build on a three-layer architecture model. (1) In the sensing layer, EMRadar will incorporate innovative signal processing techniques to extract weak EM signals that are deeply buried in noise and contaminated by interference.

To achieve this, the EMRadar will exploit the unique characteristics of EM emissions from a processor or memory and IoT software behavior, enabling novel methods that can adapt and optimize signal processing techniques used in classic Radar systems for highly sensitive EM sensing. (2) In the representation layer, this project will explore universal representation and classification of EM signals to unravel EM side-channel emissions of processors and memories. Despite extensive studies on EM side-channel emissions, accurate explanation of the semantics of EM side-channel signals remains highly challenging due to significant variation of EM signal pattern and the EM interference produced by workloads running on the same device.

This project will leverage the recent advances in time series analysis and machine learning to revisit the representation of EM signals, and conduct a systematic measurement study to understand the robustness of universal representation across IoT devices with different architectures. (3) In the application layer, the EMRadar will be evaluated in real-world setups and applications. The PI will collaborate with domain experts to explore applications of the system developed in this project, such as supporting efficient IoT-based applications in healthcare, automobile industry, and intelligent buildings.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.