| Abstract: | Side-channels are unintended pathways within target systems that leak internal information, exploitable via side-channel attack techniques that extract the target information, compromising the system’s security and privacy. Side-channel attacks are well established within the cybersecurity domain, and thus their cyber-physical systems are actively defended with countermeasures. Non-cyber systems are equally as vulnerable to side-channel attacks; however, this is largely unrecognised and therefore countermeasures to defend them are limited. This paper surveys side-channel attacks against non-cyber systems and investigates the consequent security and privacy ramifications. Side-channel attack techniques rely on respective side-channel properties in order to succeed; therefore, countermeasures that disrupt each side-channel property are identified, effectively thwarting the side-channel attack. This principle is captured within a countermeasure algorithm: a systematic and extensible approach to identifying candidate countermeasures for non-cyber systems. We validate the output of this process by showing how the candidate countermeasures could be applied in the context of each non-cyber system and in the real world. This work provides an extensible platform for translating cybersecurity-derived side-channel attack research into defending systems from non-cyber domains. |
