Asanka Priyadarshana Sayakkara

Thesis: 
Electromagnetic Side-Channel Analysis for Digital Forensics on Internet of Things

The domain of digital forensics deals with providing digital evidences to support legal cases. The traditional digital forensic practice involves analyzing the file system data from a suspect computer to extract digital evidences. The emerging trend of Internet of Things (IoT) being used in day-to-day life has broadened the horizon of digital forensics. While IoT device data are already being used as sigital evidences nowadays, most of these data are extracted from smart-phones and cloud servers to which IoT devices are constantly connected. Due to lack of non-intrusive methods to reliably inspect internal activities of IoT devices, they are not directly inspected in digital forensic investigations. This situation leaves a possibility for any maliciously altered IoT device to tamper digital evidences. This research project investigates the potential of using electromagnetic side-channel analysis (EM-SCA) techniques as a nonintrusive way to accurately and efficiently inspect internal software activities of IoT devices in order to extract forensically useful insights that can help to advance an investigation.

Supervisor: 
Dr. Nhien-An Le-Khac
Email: 
asanka.sayakkara@ucdconnect.ie
Research Group: 
UCD Forensics and Security Research Group