EMA as a Physical Method for Extracting Secret Data from Mobile Phones

Today’s mobile phones have diverse functions and features such as calling, Internet surfing, game playing, banking, storage of personal and professional data. Given that these devices run an increasing amount of added value applications, the number of the software attacks on such devices has drastically increased. This study shows that the mobile platforms, especially their constituent components running security-related applications, could also be good targets for hardware attacks where sensitive data stored in the mobile phone are extracted using physical methods. This article discusses the feasibility and presents the result of a technique involving the extraction of secret keys by using the Electromagnetic Analysis (EMA) on software implementations of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) running on Java mobile phones. Obtaining these keys can be used for forensic purposes or to recover encrypted data that could have been enciphered using such keys and stored in the device.

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