Analysis of EM Side Channel Attacks On Smartphones (Fraunhofer AISEC, BSI, TUM)

Researchers from Fraunhofer AISEC, the German Federal Office for Information Security, and TU Munich published a technical paper titled “Breaking ECDSA with Electromagnetic Side-Channel Attacks: Challenges and Practicality on Modern Smartphones.” The paper explores the vulnerability of modern smartphones to physical side-channel analysis, focusing on electromagnetic (EM) side-channel attacks. The study assesses the feasibility of EM side-channel attacks on smartphones with advanced system on chip (SoC) platforms, recovering ECDSA secrets from OpenSSL on devices like the Raspberry Pi 4 and Fairphone 4. The findings highlight weaknesses in ECDSA software implementations and emphasize the importance of secure elements in smartphones, especially for critical tasks like electronic identification.