Alongside traditional Information and Communication Technologies, more recent ones like Smartphones and IoT devices also became pervasive. Furthermore, all technologies manage an increasing amount of confidential data. The concern of protecting these data is not only related to an adversary gaining physical or remote control of a victim device through traditional attacks but also to what extent an adversary without the above capabilities can infer or steal information through the side and covert channels! In this talk, we survey a corpus of representative research results published in the domain of side and covert channels, ranging from TIFS 2016 to more recent Usenix Security 2022, including several demonstrations at Black Hat Hacking Conferences. We discuss threats coming from contextual information and to which extent it is feasible to infer precise information. In particular, we discuss attacks like inferring actions that a user is doing on mobile apps by eavesdropping on their encrypted network traffic, identifying the presence of a specific user within a network through analysis of energy consumption, or inferring information (also key one like passwords and PINs) through timing, acoustic, or video information.
15/03/2023