Experimental Demonstration of Electromagnetic Information Leakage From Modern Processor-Memory Systems

Abstract

This paper shows that electromagnetic (EM) information leakage from modern laptops and desktops (with no peripherals attached) is indeed possible and is relatively easy to achieve. The experiments are performed on three laptop systems and one desktop system with different processors (Intel Centrino, Core 2, Core i7, and AMD Turion), and show that both active (program deliberately tries to cause emanations at a particular frequency) and passive (emanations at different frequencies happen as a result of system activity) EM side-channel attacks are possible on all the systems we tested. Furthermore, this paper shows that EM information leakage can reliably be received at distances that vary from tens of centimeters to several meters including the signals that have propagated through cubicle or structural walls. Finally, this paper shows how activity levels and data values used in accessing different parts of the memory subsystem (off-chip memory and each level of on-chip caches) affect the transmission distance.