A Case Study of Side-Channel Authentication Using Screaming Channel

Side-channel authentication leverages physical information leaked from cryptographic devices, using noisy analog data tied to a unique secret key. The method is effective against man-in-the-middle attacks, such as relay attacks, due to the difficulty of duplicating the data without access to the secret key. Thus, we demonstrate the use of “screaming channel,” which is an information leakage path through electronic components with mixed digital and analog signals. It has been reported that electrical changes in the digital component can be verified at a distance of several meters via screaming channel. It is expected to expand the authentication range of the electromagnetic side-channel authentication, which has so far been possible only from a distance of a few millimeters. We demonstrate that a device with AES hardware can securely authenticate at a distance of 0.1 m from the verifier and quantitatively evaluated authentication accuracy using authentication accuracy metrics such as FAR and FRR.