Title:  Leveraging Electromagnetic Side-Channel for Software Activity Analysis and Modeling

Committee: 

Dr. Zajic, Advisor

Dr. Prvulovic, Co-Advisor       

Dr. Saltaformaggio, Chair

Dr. Anderson

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to analyze and model software activities of modern computing devices by leveraging the electromagnetic side-channel. Our research proposes a systematic framework to analyze and model software activities at finer granularities on modern computers with pipelined processors and high clock frequencies. Particularly, the first objective of the proposed research is to create a technique that allows for increasing effective sampling rate and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the signals collected with available measurement devices. Second objective is to provide a framework 1) to identify groups of instructions that have similar electromagnetic (EM) signatures, 2) track all possible orderings, i.e. permutations, of these instruction groups. Final objective is to model the EM side-channel emanations by addressing microarchitecture-level properties such as instruction pipelining and branch prediction.