Building a Side Channel Based Disassembler

For the last ten years, side channel research has focused on extracting data leakage with the goal of recovering secret keys of embedded cryptographic implementations. For about the same time it has been known that side channel leakage contains information about many other internal processes of a computing device. In this work we exploit side channel information to recover large parts of the program executed on an embedded processor. We present the first complete methodology to recover the program code of a microcontroller by evaluating its power consumption only. Besides well-studied methods from side channel analysis, we apply Hidden Markov Models to exploit prior knowledge about the program code. In addition to quantifying the potential of the created side channel based disassembler, we highlight its diverse and unique application scenarios.

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