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Abstract
Investigation on smart devices has become an essential subdomain in digital
forensics. The inherent diversity and complexity of smart devices pose a
challenge to the extraction of evidence without physically tampering with it,
which is often a strict requirement in law enforcement and legal proceedings.
Recently, this has led to the application of non-intrusive Electromagnetic
Side-Channel Analysis (EM-SCA) as an emerging approach to extract forensic
insights from smart devices. EM-SCA for digital forensics is still in its
infancy, and has only been tested on a small number of devices so far. Most
importantly, the question still remains whether Machine Learning (ML) models in
EM-SCA are portable across multiple devices to be useful in digital forensics,
i.e., cross-device portability. This study experimentally explores this aspect
of EM-SCA using a wide set of smart devices. The experiments using various
iPhones and Nordic Semiconductor nRF52-DK devices indicate that the direct
application of pre-trained ML models across multiple identical devices does not
yield optimal outcomes (under 20% accuracy in most cases). Subsequent
experiments included collecting distinct samples of EM traces from all the
devices to train new ML models with mixed device data; this also fell short of
expectations (still below 20% accuracy). This prompted the adoption of transfer
learning techniques, which showed promise for cross-model implementations. In
particular, for the iPhone 13 and nRF52-DK devices, applying transfer learning
techniques resulted in achieving the highest accuracy, with accuracy scores of
98% and 96%, respectively. This result makes a significant advancement in the
application of EM-SCA to digital forensics by enabling the use of pre-trained
models across identical or similar devices.