Securing Data From Side-Channel Attacks: A Graph Neural Network-Based Approach for Smartphone-Based Side Channel Attack Detection

The widespread use of smartphones has brought convenience and connectivity to the fingertips of the masses. As a result, this has paved the way for potential security vulnerabilities concerning sensitive data, particularly by exploiting side-channel attacks. When typing on a smartphone’s keyboard, its vibrations can be misused to discern the entered characters, thus facilitating side-channel attacks. These smartphone hardware sensors can capture such information while users input sensitive data like personal details, names, email addresses, age, bank details and passwords. This study presents a novel Graph Neural Network (GNN) approach to predict side-channel attacks on smartphone keyboards; different GNN architectures were used, including GNN, DeepGraphNet, Gradient Boosting (GB)+DeepGraphNet, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB)+DeepGraphNet and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN)+DeepGraphNet. The proposed approach detects the side channel attack using vibrations produced while typing on the smartphone soft keyboard. The data was collected from three smartphone sensors, an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer, and evaluated this data using common evaluation measures such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, ROC curves, confusion matrix and accuracy and loss curves. This study demonstrated that GNN architectures can effectively capture complex relationships in data, making them well-suited for analyzing patterns in smartphone sensor data. Likewise, this research aims to fill a crucial gap by enhancing data privacy in the information entered through smartphone keyboards, shielding it from side-channel attacks by providing an accuracy of 98.26%. Subsequently, the primary objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of GNN architectures in this precise context. Similarly, the GNN model exhibits compelling performance, achieving accuracy, precision, recall, and f1 score metrics that showcase the model’s effectiveness, with the highest values of 0.98, 0.98, 0.98, and 0.98, respectively. Significantly, the metrics mentioned in the study outperform those documented in the previous literature. Overall, the study contributes to the detection of side-channel smartphone attacks, which advances secure data practices.INDEX TERMS Graph neural networks (GNN), keystroke inference, motion sensors, machine learning, smartphone security, side-channel attacks.