An Electromagnetic Approach to Smart Card Instruction Identification using Machine Learning Techniques

Since the first publication, side channel leakage has been widely used for the purposes of extracting secret information, such as cryptographic keys, from embedded devices. However, in a few instances it has been utilized for extracting other information about the internal state of a computing device. In this paper, we show how to create a robust instruction-level side channel leakage profile of an embedded processor. Using the electromagnetic profile we show how to extract executed instructions from a smart card's leakage with good accuracy. In addition, we provide a comparison between several performance and recognition enhancement tools.