The proliferation of ubiquitous computing requires energy-efficient as well
as secure operation of modern processors. Side channel attacks are becoming a
critical threat to security and privacy of devices embedded in modern computing
infrastructures. Unintended information leakage via physical signatures such as
power consumption, electromagnetic emission (EM) and execution time have
emerged as a key security consideration for SoCs. Also, information published
on purpose at user privilege level accessible through software interfaces
results in software only attacks. In this paper, we used a supervised learning
based approach for inferring applications executing on android platform based
on features extracted from EM side-channel emissions and software exposed
dynamic voltage frequency scaling(DVFS) states. We highlight the importance of
machine learning based approach in utilizing these multi-dimensional features
on a complex SoC, against profiling-based approaches. We also show that
learning the instantaneous frequency states polled from onboard frequency
driver (cpufreq) is adequate to identify a known application and flag
potentially malicious unknown application. The experimental results on
benchmarking applications running on ARMv8 processor in Snapdragon 820 board
demonstrates early detection of these apps, and atleast 85% accuracy in
detecting unknown applications. Overall, the highlight is to utilize a
low-complexity path to application inference attacks through learning
instantaneous frequency states pattern of CPU core.