skip to main content
research-article

Device Fingerprinting with Magnetic Induction Signals Radiated by CPU Modules

Published: 21 December 2021 Publication History

Abstract

With the widespread use of smart devices, device authentication has received much attention. One popular method for device authentication is to utilize internally measured device fingerprints, such as device ID, software or hardware-based characteristics. In this article, we propose DeMiCPU, a stimulation-response-based device fingerprinting technique that relies on externally measured information, i.e., magnetic induction (MI) signals emitted from the CPU module that consists of the CPU chip and its affiliated power-supply circuits. The key insight of DeMiCPU is that hardware discrepancies essentially exist among CPU modules and thus the corresponding MI signals make promising device fingerprints, which are difficult to be modified or mimicked. We design a stimulation and a discrepancy extraction scheme and evaluate them with 90 mobile devices, including 70 laptops (among which 30 are of totally identical CPU and operating system) and 20 smartphones. The results show that DeMiCPU can achieve 99.7% precision and recall on average, and 99.8% precision and recall for the 30 identical devices, with a fingerprinting time of 0.6~s. The performance can be further improved to 99.9% with multi-round fingerprinting. In addition, we implement a prototype of DeMiCPU docker, which can effectively reduce the requirement of test points and enlarge the fingerprinting area.

References

[1]
Hidayet Aksu, A. Selcuk Uluagac, and Elizabeth Bentley. 2021. Identification of wearable devices with bluetooth. IEEE Trans. Sustain. Comput. 6, 2 (2021), 221–230.
[2]
Jonathan Allen. 1977. Short term spectral analysis, synthesis, and modification by discrete fourier transform. IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Sig. Process. 25, 3 (1977), 235–238.
[3]
Gianmarco Baldini, Gary Steri, Franc Dimc, Raimondo Giuliani, and Roman Kamnik. 2016. Experimental identification of smartphones using fingerprints of built-in micro-electro mechanical systems (mems). Sensors 16, 6 (2016), 818.
[4]
Steven M. Bellovin and Michael Merritt. 1993. Cryptographic protocol for secure communications. US Patent 5,241,599.
[5]
Hristo Bojinov, Yan Michalevsky, Gabi Nakibly, and Dan Boneh. 2014. Mobile device identification via sensor fingerprinting. Arxiv Preprint arXiv:1408.1416.
[6]
Vladimir Brik, Suman Banerjee, Marco Gruteser, and Sangho Oh. 2008. Wireless device identification with radiometric signatures. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’08). ACM, 116–127.
[7]
Robert Callan, Farnaz Behrang, Alenka Zajic, Milos Prvulovic, and Alessandro Orso. 2016. Zero-overhead profiling via em emanations. In Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA’16). ACM, 401–412.
[8]
Robert Callan, Nina Popovic, Angel Daruna, Eric Pollmann, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic. 2015. Comparison of electromagnetic side-channel energy available to the attacker from different computer systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC’15). IEEE, 219–223.
[9]
Robert Callan, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic. 2014. A practical methodology for measuring the side-channel signal available to the attacker for instruction-level events. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO’14). IEEE, 242–254.
[10]
Ke-Yu Chen, Sidhant Gupta, Eric C. Larson, and Shwetak Patel. 2015. DOSE: Detecting user-driven operating states of electronic devices from a single sensing point. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom’15). IEEE, 46–54.
[11]
Yushi Cheng, Xiaoyu Ji, Wenyuan Xu, Hao Pan, Zhuangdi Zhu, Chuang-Wen You, Yi-Chao Chen, and Lili Qiu. 2019. Magattack: Guessing application launching and operation via smartphone. In Proceedings of the on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS’19). 283–294.
[12]
Yushi Cheng, Xiaoyu Ji, Juchuan Zhang, Wenyuan Xu, and Yi-Chao Chen. 2019. DeMiCPU: Device fingerprinting with magnetic signals radiated by CPU. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’19).
[13]
Terry L. Cleveland. 2005. Bi-directional power system for laptop computers. In Apec, Vol. 1. IEEE, 199–203.
[14]
Anupam Das, Nikita Borisov, and Matthew Caesar. 2014. Do you hear what I hear?: Fingerprinting smart devices through embedded acoustic components. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’14). ACM, 441–452.
[15]
Loh Chin Choong Desmond, Cho Chia Yuan, Tan Chung Pheng, and Ri Seng Lee. 2008. Identifying unique devices through wireless fingerprinting. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec’08). ACM, 46–55.
[16]
Sanorita Dey, Nirupam Roy, Wenyuan Xu, Romit Roy Choudhury, and Srihari Nelakuditi. 2014. Accelprint: Imperfections of accelerometers make smartphones trackable. In Proceedings of the 21st Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’14).
[17]
Ahmet Emir Dirik, Husrev Taha Sencar, and Nasir Memon. 2008. Digital single lens reflex camera identification from traces of sensor dust. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forens. Secur. 3, 3 (2008), 539–552.
[18]
Jason Franklin, Damon McCoy, Parisa Tabriz, Vicentiu Neagoe, Jamie V. Randwyk, and Douglas Sicker. 2006. Passive data link layer 802.11 wireless device driver fingerprinting. In Proceedings of the 15th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security’06), Vol. 3. 16–89.
[19]
Gartner. 2017. Gartner Forecasts Flat Worldwide Device Shipments Until 2018. Retrieved from http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3560517.
[20]
Daniel Genkin, Lev Pachmanov, Itamar Pipman, and Eran Tromer. 2015. Stealing keys from PCs using a radio: Cheap electromagnetic attacks on windowed exponentiation. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES’15). Springer, 207–228.
[21]
Robin Getz and Bob Moeckel. 1996. Understanding and eliminating EMI in microcontroller applications. Nat. Semicond.
[22]
Pierre Geurts, Damien Ernst, and Louis Wehenkel. 2006. Extremely randomized trees. Mach. Learn. 63, 1 (2006), 3–42.
[23]
Louis Goubin. 2003. A refined power-analysis attack on elliptic curve cryptosystems. In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Theory and Practice in Public Key Cryptography (PKC’03). Springer, 199–211.
[24]
Jeyanthi Hall, Michel Barbeau, and Evangelos Kranakis. 2005. Radio frequency fingerprinting for intrusion detection in wireless networks. IEEE Trans. Defend. Sec. Comput. 12 (2005), 1–35.
[25]
Yi Han, Sriharsha Etigowni, Hua Liu, Saman Zonouz, and Athina Petropulu. 2017. Watch me, but don’t touch me! Contactless control flow monitoring via electromagnetic emanations. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’17). 1095–1108.
[26]
Thomas Hupperich, Henry Hosseini, and Thorsten Holz. 2016. Leveraging sensor fingerprinting for mobile device authentication. In Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment. Springer, 377–396.
[27]
Texas Instrument. 2016. Integrated Fluxgate Magnetic Sensor IC for Open-loop Applications. Retrieved from https://www.ti.com/product/DRV425.
[28]
Texas Instruments. 2017. MSP430F5529 LaunchPad Development Kit. Retrieved from http://www.ti.com/lit/ug/slau533d/slau533d.pdf.
[29]
Anil K. Jain, Lin Hong, Sharath Pankanti, and Ruud Bolle. 1997. An identity-authentication system using fingerprints. Proc. IEEE 85, 9 (1997), 1365–1388.
[30]
Keysight. 2017. U2541A 250kSa/s USB Modular Simultaneous Data Acquisition. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/yb5r768y.
[31]
Haider Adnan Khan, Nader Sehatbakhsh, Luong N. Nguyen, Milos Prvulovic, and Alenka Zajić. 2019. Malware detection in embedded systems using neural network model for electromagnetic side-channel signals. J. Hardw. Syst. Secur. 3, 4 (2019), 305–318.
[32]
Tadayoshi Kohno, Andre Broido, and Kimberly C. Claffy. 2005. Remote physical device fingerprinting. IEEE Trans. Depend. Secure Comput. 2, 2 (2005), 93–108.
[33]
Lawrence E. Langley. 1993. Specific emitter identification (SEI) and classical parameter fusion technology. In Proceedings of WESCON’93. IEEE, 377–381.
[34]
Gierad Laput, Chouchang Yang, Robert Xiao, Alanson Sample, and Chris Harrison. 2015. Em-sense: Touch recognition of uninstrumented, electrical and electromechanical objects. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST’15). 157–166.
[35]
Etienne Le Sueur and Gernot Heiser. 2010. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling: The laws of diminishing returns. In Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Power Aware Computing and Systems (HotPower’10). 1–8.
[36]
Jan Lukas, Jessica Fridrich, and Miroslav Goljan. 2006. Digital camera identification from sensor pattern noise. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forens. Secur. 1, 2 (2006), 205–214.
[37]
Koufaty, David, and Deborah T. Marr. 2005. Hyperthreading technology in the netburst microarchitecture. IEEE Micro. 23, 2 (2003), 56–65.
[38]
Ron Mondri and Sara Bitan. 2009. Inspected secure communication protocol. US Patent 7,584,505.
[39]
Alireza Nazari, Nader Sehatbakhsh, Monjur Alam, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic. 2017. Eddie: EmMbased detection of deviations in program execution. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA’17). 333–346.
[40]
Kim Thuat Nguyen, Maryline Laurent, and Nouha Oualha. 2015. Survey on secure communication protocols for the internet of things. Ad Hoc Netw. 32 (2015), 17–31.
[41]
Hao Pan, Yi-Chao Chen, Guangtao Xue, and Xiaoyu Ji. 2017. MagneComm: Magnetometer-based near-field communication. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’17). 167–179.
[42]
Hao Pan, Lanqing Yang, Honglu Li, Chuang-Wen You, Xiaoyu Ji, Yi-Chao Chen, Zhenxian Hu, and Guangtao Xue. 2021. MagThief: Stealing private app usage data on mobile devices via built-in magnetometer. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Structural Engineering and Construction Management (SECON’21). IEEE, 1–9.
[43]
Jeffrey Pang, Ben Greenstein, Ramakrishna Gummadi, Srinivasan Seshan, and David Wetherall. 2007. 802.11 user fingerprinting. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’07). ACM, 99–110.
[44]
Sakthi Vignesh Radhakrishnan, A. Selcuk Uluagac, and Raheem Beyah. 2015. GTID: A technique for physical device and device type fingerprinting. IEEE Trans. Depend. Secure Comput. 12, 5 (2015), 519–532.
[45]
Nalini K. Ratha, Ruud M. Bolle, Vinayaka D. Pandit, and Vaibhav Vaish. 2000. Robust fingerprint authentication using local structural similarity. In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV’00). IEEE, 29–34.
[46]
K. A. Remley, Chriss A. Grosvenor, Robert T. Johnk, David R. Novotny, Paul D. Hale, M. D. McKinley, A. Karygiannis, and E. Antonakakis. 2005. Electromagnetic signatures of WLAN cards and network security. In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT’05). IEEE, 484–488.
[47]
David A. Solomon, Mark E. Russinovich, and Alex Ionescu. 2009. Windows Internals. Microsoft Press.
[48]
Barron Stone and Samuel Stone. 2016. Comparison of radio frequency based techniques for device discrimination and operation identification. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS’16). 475.
[49]
D. Suleiman, M. Ibrahim, and I. Hamarash. 2005. Dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) for microprocessors power and energy reduction. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Electrical and Electronics Engineering (ICEEE’05).
[50]
Matthew Travers. 2015. CPU power consumption experiments and results analysis of Intel i7-4820K. Newcastle University, Newcastle
[51]
A. Selcuk Uluagac, Sakthi V. Radhakrishnan, Cherita Corbett, Antony Baca, and Raheem Beyah. 2013. A passive technique for fingerprinting wireless devices with wired-side observations. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS’13). IEEE, 305–313.
[52]
Oktay Ureten and Nur Serinken. 2007. Wireless security through RF fingerprinting. Canad. J. Electric. Comput. Eng. 32, 1 (2007), 27–33.
[53]
Tom Van Goethem, Wout Scheepers, Davy Preuveneers, and Wouter Joosen. 2016. Accelerometer-based device fingerprinting for multi-factor mobile authentication. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS’16). Springer, 106–121.
[54]
Edward J. Wang, Tien-Jui Lee, Alex Mariakakis, Mayank Goel, Sidhant Gupta, and Shwetak N. Patel. 2015. MagnifSense: Inferring device interaction using wrist-worn passive magneto-inductive sensors. In Proceedings of the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp’15). ACM, 15–26.
[55]
Wikipedia. 2018. Ampére’s Circuital Law. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmpC3A8re27s_circuital_law.
[56]
Svante Wold, Kim Esbensen, and Paul Geladi. 1987. Principal component analysis. Chemomet. Intell. Lab. Syst. 2, 1–3 (1987), 37–52.
[57]
Kaiyuan Yang, Matthew Hicks, Qing Dong, Todd Austin, and Dennis Sylvester. 2017. Exploiting the analog properties of digital circuits for malicious hardware. Commun. ACM 60, 9 (2017), 83–91.
[58]
Ting-Fang Yen, Yinglian Xie, Fang Yu, Roger Peng Yu, and Martin Abadi. 2012. Host fingerprinting and tracking on the web: Privacy and security implications. In Proceedings of the 19th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’12).
[59]
Guoming Zhang, Chen Yan, Xiaoyu Ji, Tianchen Zhang, Taimin Zhang, and Wenyuan Xu. 2017. DolphinAttack: Inaudible voice commands. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’17). 103–117.
[60]
Juchuan Zhang, Xiaoyu Ji, Wenyuan Xu, Yi-Chao Chen, Yuting Tang, and Gang Qu. 2020. MagView: A distributed magnetic covert channel via video encoding and decoding. In Proceedings of the 39th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM’20). IEEE, 357–366.
[61]
Jiayu Zhang, Zhiyun Wang, Xiaoyu Ji, Wenyuan Xu, Gang Qu, and Minjian Zhao. 2020. Who is charging my phone? Identifying wireless chargers via fingerprinting. IEEE Internet Things J. 8, 4 (2020), 2992–2999.
[62]
Xinyan Zhou, Xiaoyu Ji, Chen Yan, Jiangyi Deng, and Wenyuan Xu. 2019. NAuth: Secure face-to-face device authentication via nonlinearity. In Proceedings of the 38th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM’19). IEEE, 2080–2088.
[63]
Zhe Zhou, Wenrui Diao, Xiangyu Liu, and Kehuan Zhang. 2014. Acoustic fingerprinting revisited: Generate stable device ID stealthily with inaudible sound. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’14). ACM, 429–440.
[64]
Zhou Zhuang, Xiaoyu Ji, Taimin Zhang, Juchuan Zhang, Wenyuan Xu, Zhenhua Li, and Yunhao Liu. 2018. FBSleuth: Fake base station forensics via radio frequency fingerprinting. In Proceedings of the Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS’18). 261–272.
[65]
Ling Zou, Qianhua He, and Junfeng Wu. 2017. Source cell phone verification from speech recordings using sparse representation. Dig. Sig. Process. 62 (2017), 125–136.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Passive Fingerprinting of Same-Model Electrical Devices by Current ConsumptionSensors10.3390/s2301053323:1(533)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2023
  • (2023)Mag-Auth: Authenticating Wireless Transmitters and Receivers on the Receiver Side via Magnetic EmissionsProceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks10.1145/3558482.3590198(305-316)Online publication date: 29-May-2023

Index Terms

  1. Device Fingerprinting with Magnetic Induction Signals Radiated by CPU Modules

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
    ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks  Volume 18, Issue 2
    May 2022
    370 pages
    ISSN:1550-4859
    EISSN:1550-4867
    DOI:10.1145/3494076
    Issue’s Table of Contents

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Journal Family

    Publication History

    Published: 21 December 2021
    Accepted: 01 November 2021
    Revised: 01 November 2021
    Received: 01 March 2021
    Published in TOSN Volume 18, Issue 2

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. Device fingerprinting
    2. electromagnetic radiation
    3. CPU

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article
    • Refereed

    Funding Sources

    • China NSFC
    • ZJNSF
    • CPSF

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)89
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10
    Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Passive Fingerprinting of Same-Model Electrical Devices by Current ConsumptionSensors10.3390/s2301053323:1(533)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2023
    • (2023)Mag-Auth: Authenticating Wireless Transmitters and Receivers on the Receiver Side via Magnetic EmissionsProceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks10.1145/3558482.3590198(305-316)Online publication date: 29-May-2023

    View Options

    Login options

    Full Access

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Full Text

    View this article in Full Text.

    Full Text

    HTML Format

    View this article in HTML Format.

    HTML Format

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media