Android operating system restricts access to data by enabling data control flow and permission systems to reduce the risk of information theft. Therefore, attackers are constantly looking for alternative and stealthy approaches to exfiltrate private data from a targeted device. This paper presents CovertPower, a covert channel attack that exfiltrates user data by actively inducing power consumption on Android devices. At the transmitting end, our CovertPower app modulates binary data into a timed resource workload (e.g., processor, write-on-memory), producing power consumption bursts. On the receiving end, we acquire power consumption traces via a low-cost hardware tool that can be easily concealed in USB wall-socket adapters or powerbanks. Therefore, a signal processing-based decoder analyzes such traces and retrieves the exfiltrated information. We demonstrate the feasibility of our attack with a thorough experimental evaluation on 14 mobile devices and various real-world settings such as display state, ongoing activities, and charging technologies. Our attack achieves a transfer speed of up to 10bps with a high bit sequence similarity on most devices and settings considered.

The literature and the news regularly report cases of exploiting Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices as attack tools for malware injections and private data exfiltration. To protect against such attacks, security researchers proposed different solutions to verify the identity of a USB device via side-channel information (e.g., timing or electromagnetic emission). However, such solutions often make strong assumptions on the measurement (e.g., electromagnetic interference-free area around the device), on a device’s state (e.g., only at the boot or during specific actions), or are limited to one particular type of USB device (e.g., flash drive or input devices).In this paper, we present PowerID, a novel method to fingerprint USB peripherals based on their power consumption. PowerID analyzes the power traces from a peripheral to infer its identity and properties. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on an extensive power trace dataset collected from 82 USB peripherals, including 35 models and 8 types. Our experimental results show that PowerID accurately recognizes a peripheral type, model, activity, and identity.

The attacks that leverage the side-channels produced by processes running on mobile and IoT devices are a concrete threat for cyber–physical systems. This special issue is focused on the most recent research work that investigates novel aspects of this topic. This editorial summarizes the contributions of the seven accepted papers for this special issue.