Rethinking Side-Channel Analysis: Automated Discovery and Analysis of Side-Channel Leakage with LLM-Assisted Agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces SCAgent, an automated framework leveraging large language models and few-shot learning to systematically discover and analyze side-channel leaks in complex systems like iOS, reducing manual effort.

Contribution

It presents a novel automated approach combining semantic reasoning, verification, and feature extraction to identify sensitive events and side channels without extensive manual analysis.

Findings

Successfully applied to iOS, identifying new side channels.

Effective in standard benchmarks like app and website fingerprinting.

Reduces manual effort in side-channel analysis through automation.

Abstract

Side-channel attacks exploit unintended information leakage from system behavior and continue to pose serious privacy risks in modern platforms. Despite extensive prior work, side-channel analysis remains largely manual and fragmented, typically assuming predefined target events and a fixed set of known channels. As systems and applications grow increasingly complex, several fundamental questions remain unanswered: which user or system events are sensitive in practice, how side channels associated with these events can be systematically discovered without exhaustive manual effort, and how their leakage can be analyzed at scale without prohibitive data collection and model training costs. To address these questions, we present SCAgent, an automated framework for side-channel risk analysis. To identify sensitive targets beyond manually specified events, SCAgent performs agent-driven system exploration guided by LLM-based semantic reasoning. To systematically discover side channels while mitigating the risk of LLM hallucination, it reasons over system documentation and incorporates explicit verification to enforce semantic consistency, threat-model feasibility, and per-channel usability. To enable scalable analysis under limited data, SCAgent adopts a few-shot learning paradigm based on foundation models, avoiding the need to train bespoke models for each channel--event pair. To bridge the gap between raw time-series side-channel signals and tabular foundation models, SCAgent further introduces a time-shift--robust feature extraction layer that enables effective downstream analysis. We instantiate SCAgent on iOS as a first step, focusing on OS-level side channels observable by unprivileged applications. Our evaluation spans standard benchmarks such as foreground app and website fingerprinting, as well as newly identified sensitive in-app activities in popular applications.