ECE Graduate Seminar Lecture Series, Speaker: Xiaoyan (Sherry) Sun, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, WPI

Title:

Exposing Privacy Risks through Electromagnetic Signals

Abstract:

As electronic devices become increasingly integrated into daily life, their electromagnetic (EM) emissions introduce a significant yet overlooked privacy risk. This talk will present our studies on how EM leakage can be exploited to infer privacy information. One work systematically examines using EM leakage from smartwatches to infer user interactions and behavioral patterns. We proposed a system named MagWatch, a novel non-intrusive attack that applies wavelet transform for signal processing and leverages a CNN-LSTM model to identify applications and in-app activities, achieving up to 90% accuracy across multiple smartwatch models. Our findings reveal a critical security vulnerability, demonstrating that attackers can passively monitor EM emissions to reconstruct user interactions, exposing sensitive information such as communication habits and app usage patterns. Another work reveals that the EM emissions from palm recognition systems can be used to recover palm biometric information, including palmprint and palmvein images. These research highlights the urgent need for privacy-preserving countermeasures in electronic devices and establishes a foundation for future studies on EM side-channel security risks

Speaker:

Xiaoyan (Sherry) Sun

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, WPI

Bio:

Xiaoyan (Sherry) Sun is an Associate Professor with Department of Computer Science, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She received her Ph.D. degree in Information Sciences and Technology from the Pennsylvania State University in 2016 with emphasis on cybersecurity. Her research interests lie in system and network security, AI security, digital forensics, and secure programming, etc. Her work has been supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), National Security Agency (NSA), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Host: Professor Alex Wyglinski