Power Consumption-Based Identification of Used Encryption Solution in IoT Environments

State-of-the-art encryption algorithms, if applied properly, provide virtually unbreakable protection of confidentiality and integrity of data. However, there are black-box attacks that can provide the attacker with valuable sensitive (meta) information—e.g. the identity of the person using the system, the presence of the user, the schedule of use, etc. In this paper, we present some early results related to the identification of used encryption protocols in IoT environments, based on energy consumption. We measured power consumption on three Nvidia Jetson devices, within the 128 sessions, when using plain FTP, WireGuard, OpenSSL, and OpenSSL+WireGuard-based transfers. Finally, we used classification algorithms to determine the reliability of this approach in identifying the protocol that was used in a data transfer.