• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.227-242
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• 2022

This paper presents a Cache-Coherency Interconnect(CCI)-based Android pattern screen lock(PSL) attack on modern ARM processors. CCI has been introduced to maintain the cache coherency between the big core cluster and the little core cluster. That is, CCI is the central interconnect inside SoC that maintains cache coherency and shares data. In this paper, we reveal that CCI can be a side channel in security, that an adversary can observe security-sensitive operations. We design and implement a technique to compromise Android PSL within only a few attempts using the information of CCI in user-level applications on Android Nougat. Further, we analyzed the relationship between the pattern complexity and security. Our evaluation results show that complex and simple patterns would have similar security strengths against the proposed technique.