Screaming Channels: When Electromagnetic Side Channels Meet Radio Transceivers
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Presented at Grehack 2018 by
"Screaming Channels" are a new side channel that affect mixed-signal chips used in widespread wireless communication protocols, such as Bluetooth and WiFi. This increasingly common type of chip includes the radio transceiver along with digital logic on the same integrated circuit. In such systems, the radio transmitter may unintentionally broadcast sensitive information from hardware cryptographic components or software executing on the CPU. The analog noise produced by the digital logic is inadvertently mixed with the radio carrier, which is amplified and then transmitted by the antenna. This allows electromagnetic side-channel attacks to succeed over a much longer range than before, as our team demonstrated in a proof of concept for remote AES key extraction over a distance of 10m. This talk will cover the background to understand the side channel, give insight about how it was discovered, and discuss its impact and implications for the future.