2021/05/31 by Carlton Shepherd, Konstantinos Markantonakis, Nico van Heijningen +4 · 66 citations
Computer Science · #cs.CR
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.cose.2021.102471
published in Computers & Security 111, 102471 (Elsevier BV)
crossref created 2021/09/17 · crossref issued 2021/12/01 · crossref published 2021/12/01 · crossref published-print 2021/12/01 · arxiv created 2022/03/22 · arxiv updated 2022/03/23 · crossref deposited 2025/09/28 · crossref indexed 2026/08/06
Today's mobile devices contain densely packaged system-on-chips (SoCs) with multi-core, high-frequency CPUs and complex pipelines. In parallel, sophisticated SoC-assisted security mechanisms have become commonplace for protecting device data, such as trusted execution environments, full-disk and file-based encryption. Both advancements have dramatically complicated the use of conventional physical attacks, requiring the development of specialised attacks. In this survey, we consolidate recent developments in physical fault injections and side-channel attacks on modern mobile devices. In total, we comprehensively survey over 50 fault injection and side-channel attack papers published between 2009-2021. We evaluate the prevailing methods, compare existing attacks using a common set of criteria, identify several challenges and shortcomings, and suggest future directions of research.