TEMPEST Comeback: A Realistic Audio Eavesdropping Threat on Mixed-signal SoCs
Jieun Choi, Hae-Yong Yang, Dong‐Ho Cho
Abstract
This study presents a new TEMPEST threat that an attacker can surreptitiously obtain original plain audio information from a distance by exploiting recently emerging unintentional electromagnetic (EM) radiations. As lightweight sensor-based Internet of things (IoT) services become widespread, a mixed-signal system on chip (MSoC) spontaneously integrates all components, such as digital, analog, and even power circuits, into a single chipset to minimize the size of IoT devices. Accordingly, we pay attention to the accelerated integration of a switching regulator (SWREG), which is one of the typical power circuits and may substantially increase the unintentional EM leakages, re-enabling the audio TEMPEST attack.