ShieldBypass: On the Persistence of Impedance Leakage Beyond EM Shielding
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arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866914536063238144 |
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| author | Awal, Md Sadik Rahman, Md Tauhidur |
| author_facet | Awal, Md Sadik Rahman, Md Tauhidur |
| contents | Electromagnetic (EM) shielding is widely used to suppress radiated emissions and limit passive EM side-channel leakage. However, shielding does not address active probing, where an adversary injects external radio-frequency (RF) signals and observes the device's reflective response. This work studies whether such impedance-modulated backscattering persists when radiated emissions are suppressed by shielding. By injecting controlled RF signals and analyzing the reflections, we demonstrate that state-dependent impedance variations remain observable at frequencies outside the shields' primary attenuation band. Using processors implemented on FPGA and microcontroller prototypes, and evaluating workload profiles under three industry-standard shields, we find that passive EM measurements lose discriminative power under shielding, while backscattering responses remain separable. These results indicate that active RF probing can expose execution-dependent behavior even in shielded systems, motivating the need to consider active impedance-based probing within hardware security evaluation flows. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_04801 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | ShieldBypass: On the Persistence of Impedance Leakage Beyond EM Shielding Awal, Md Sadik Rahman, Md Tauhidur Cryptography and Security Emerging Technologies Electromagnetic (EM) shielding is widely used to suppress radiated emissions and limit passive EM side-channel leakage. However, shielding does not address active probing, where an adversary injects external radio-frequency (RF) signals and observes the device's reflective response. This work studies whether such impedance-modulated backscattering persists when radiated emissions are suppressed by shielding. By injecting controlled RF signals and analyzing the reflections, we demonstrate that state-dependent impedance variations remain observable at frequencies outside the shields' primary attenuation band. Using processors implemented on FPGA and microcontroller prototypes, and evaluating workload profiles under three industry-standard shields, we find that passive EM measurements lose discriminative power under shielding, while backscattering responses remain separable. These results indicate that active RF probing can expose execution-dependent behavior even in shielded systems, motivating the need to consider active impedance-based probing within hardware security evaluation flows. |
| title | ShieldBypass: On the Persistence of Impedance Leakage Beyond EM Shielding |
| topic | Cryptography and Security Emerging Technologies |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04801 |