Physical Fault Injection and Side-Channel Attacks on Mobile Devices: A Comprehensive Analysis
This work addresses the need for a comprehensive analysis of physical attacks on mobile devices, which is crucial for security researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it surveys existing literature without introducing new methods.
This survey consolidates recent developments in physical fault injection and side-channel attacks on modern mobile devices, analyzing over 50 papers from 2009-2021 to evaluate methods, compare attacks, and identify challenges and future research directions.
Today's mobile devices contain densely packaged system-on-chips (SoCs) with multi-core, high-frequency CPUs and complex pipelines. In parallel, sophisticated SoC-assisted security mechanisms have become commonplace for protecting device data, such as trusted execution environments, full-disk and file-based encryption. Both advancements have dramatically complicated the use of conventional physical attacks, requiring the development of specialised attacks. In this survey, we consolidate recent developments in physical fault injections and side-channel attacks on modern mobile devices. In total, we comprehensively survey over 50 fault injection and side-channel attack papers published between 2009-2021. We evaluate the prevailing methods, compare existing attacks using a common set of criteria, identify several challenges and shortcomings, and suggest future directions of research.