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EM-Eye: Limiting the Optical-Electromagnetic Side Channel Leakage of Smartphone Cameras

Project ID:

P21_23

Co-Principal Investigator(s):

N/A

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Kevin Fu 

Topic Areas:

Security Attacks, Side Channel Attacks

Abstract

The optical-electromagnetic (EM) channel in embedded camera circuits leaks sensitive images from camera systems, even when the camera is not recording. This problem is hard to solve because the circuits often require exposure to light in order to capture images in normal use, thus RF shielding would interrupt the normal use of the camera’s field of view. Moreover, the billions of already deployed smartphones makes it difficult to solve the leakage without requiring a hardware change. Our primary proposed research in the “EM Eye” project is to measure to what degree the electromagnetic leakage signals from camera circuits allow eavesdropping adversaries to recover the visual contents in the camera image streams, then testing the effectiveness of prototype defenses.

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