A new approach for measuring electromagnetic side-channel energy available to the attacker in modern processor-memory systems

This paper presents a new approach for measuring the EM side-channel energy (ESE) created in the EM side-channel by executing different processor instructions. To illustrate the usefulness of the proposed method, we have measured EM side-channel energy among 11 different instructions from three different laptops and one desktop. The results show that ESE measurements are highly repeatable (st.dev/mean < 0.05). We also show that two systems with the same design result in nearly identical measured ESE values, which implies that ESE measurements are representative of an entire manufacturing run, or possibly an entire family, of systems.