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I'm sure it won't be long before malware creators find a way to obfuscate power profiles.

How do you visualize the power profile of a specific program (can you)? Could you use a simple power analyzer to potentially detect malware, or do you need something more refined?

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This project takes a whitelist approach, rather than a blacklist approach. Malware authors could certainly turn their programs into random GOTO spaghetti in order to obtain a unique power consumption pattern. But this approach is to fingerprint the pattern of normal operations, and raise an alarm when the device starts doing abnormal things.

> How do you visualize the power profile of a specific program (can you)? Could you use a simple power analyzer to potentially detect malware, or do you need something more refined?

I don't really know. Most power analysis side channel attacks focus on embedded systems where only the target code runs. But recently, TAU researchers did very cool stuff with power analysis on laptops running a normal OS [1] and their presentation at CHES last year was very impressive.

[1] http://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/handsoff/

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