CSR: Small: Leveraging Physical Side-Channels for Good

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Internet-of-things and cyber-physical systems are becoming increasingly applicable in industrial and residential environments, opening up new opportunities for smart homes, sensor networks, and smart manufacturing. While becoming progressively more capable, this class of computing devices is typically resource-constrained with limited energy and data storage. It is thus imperative that critical applications commonly used in these devices, such as communication and debugging, be carefully designed to have minimal energy, performance, and area overhead while embracing the diversity of software and hardware present within these systems. The project’s novelties are presenting new approaches for enabling low-power low-overhead communication, fingerprinting, and debugging in internet-of-things systems. The common insight in all the proposed solutions is, instead of imposing additional overhead for achieving a particular functionality (e.g., communication or debugging), we leverage unintentional physical signals created by the system (called side-channels) to enable the desired functionalities. As a result, we are able to propose innovative and radically different methods. The project's broader significance and importance is that the proposed solutions enjoy lower energy, performance, and area storage overheads since it eliminates the need for additional infrastructure on the device to achieve the required functionality while being applicable to a wide range of systems. The objective of this project is to set out a research agenda for developing techniques and systems for addressing the fundamental challenges of internet-of-things systems. The key idea in this proposal is to leverage physical side-channels, unintentionally created by the target system, for useful purposes. Specifically, this research aims to fulfill three major objectives: (i) we design a new method for transmitting AND receiving data using side-channels. The proposed method relies only on software and is extremely low overhead. (ii) We develop a new strategy for device detection and authentication by relying only on physical side-channels as opposed to leveraging radio frequency signals which are extensively used in the state-of-the-art. (iii) We propose a new method for debugging Internet of Things devices by using physical side-channels. 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.