Exploiting Per-Core Leakage: Electromagnetic Side-Channel Monitoring of Multicore Architectures

Abstract

Multicore processors are increasingly adopted in embedded systems to meet growing performance demands. However, physical side-channel analysis of multicore architectures remains underexplored, as obtaining usable leakage is inherently challenging. Consequently, side-channel security research on such systems has lagged far behind, leaving a critical security gap. To address this gap, we reveal the electromagnetic leakage mechanisms in multicore architectures and, for the first time, demonstrate per-core leakage exploitation, thereby enabling physical side-channel analysis for these systems. As a practical extension, we present a non-intrusive side-channel monitoring method that achieves per-core granularity. To validate its feasibility and practicality, we implement a prototype on a heterogeneous SoC platform with an RF front-end, and evaluate on a commercial off-the-shelf quad-core embedded system, the Raspberry Pi 4B with ARM Cortex-A72 cores.