It’s yet another hardware side-channel attack: The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access in the near future. By loading the contents into the CPU cache before it’s actually …

Really interesting research: “ Lend Me Your Ear: Passive Remote Physical Side Channels on PCs.” Abstract: We show that built-in sensors in commodity PCs, such as microphones, inadvertently capture electromagnetic side-channel leakage from ongoing computation. Moreover, this information is often conveyed by supposedly-benign channels such as audio recordings and common …

Researchers have trained a ML model to detect keystrokes by sound with 95% accuracy. “A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards” Abstract: With recent developments in deep learning, the ubiquity of microphones and the rise in online services via personal devices, acoustic side channel attacks present …

Enlarge / Some people hate to hear other people's keyboards on video calls, but AI-backed side channel attackers? They say crank that gain. (credit: Getty Images) By recording keystrokes and training a deep learning model, three researchers claim to have achieved upwards of 90 percent accuracy in interpreting remote keystrokes …

CRYSTALS-Kyber is one of the public-key algorithms currently recommended by NIST as part of its post-quantum cryptography standardization process. Researchers have just published a side-channel attack—using power consumption—against an implementation of the algorithm that was supposed to be resistant against that sort of attack. The algorithm is …

A group of Swiss researchers have published an impressive security analysis of Threema. We provide an extensive cryptographic analysis of Threema, a Swiss-based encrypted messaging application with more than 10 million users and 7000 corporate customers. We present seven different attacks against the protocol in three different threat models …

Yet another smartphone side-channel attack: “ EarSpy: Spying Caller Speech and Identity through Tiny Vibrations of Smartphone Ear Speakers “: Abstract: Eavesdropping from the user’s smartphone is a well-known threat to the user’s safety and privacy. Existing studies show that loudspeaker reverberation can inject speech into motion sensor readings …

Okay, it’s an obscure threat. But people are researching it : Our models and experimental results in a controlled lab setting show it is possible to reconstruct and recognize with over 75 percent accuracy on-screen texts that have heights as small as 10 mm with a 720p webcam.” That …

Researchers have a new way to de-anonymize browser users, by correlating their behavior on one account with their behavior on another: The findings, which NJIT researchers will present at the Usenix Security Symposium in Boston next month, show how an attacker who tricks someone into loading a malicious website …

Hertzbleed is a new side-channel attack that works against a variety of microprocressors. Deducing cryptographic keys by analyzing power consumption has long been an attack, but it’s not generally viable because measuring power consumption is often hard. This new attack measures power consumption by measuring time, making it …

Researchers have demonstrated controlling touchscreens at a distance, at least in a laboratory setting: The core idea is to take advantage of the electromagnetic signals to execute basic touch events such as taps and swipes into targeted locations of the touchscreen with the goal of taking over remote control …

Rowhammer is an attack technique involving accessing — that’s “hammering” — rows of bits in memory, millions of times per second, with the intent of causing bits in neighboring rows to flip. This is a side-channel attack, and the result can be all sorts of mayhem. Well, there is a …

This is a clever side-channel attack: The cloning works by using a hot air gun and a scalpel to remove the plastic key casing and expose the NXP A700X chip, which acts as a secure element that stores the cryptographic secrets. Next, an attacker connects the chip to hardware …