![](https://handshake-production-cdn.joinhandshake.com/static_assets/default_institution_1.png)
2023 Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) - Power Text: Exploiting Power Line Side-Channel for Smartphone Text Entry Leakage
The College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) is a unique opportunity for college of engineering undergraduate students to engage in hands-on research with a faculty mentor while using critical thinking, collaborative, and entrepreneurial skills. SURP is an 8-week long program (can be non-contiguous), and students are expected to spend at least 20 hours/week working on their research projects and additional time preparing and presenting their poster for the annual SURP symposium; SURP students and their faculty mentor will agree upon a start date and timeline for their research project (with a suggested start date of June 26th, 2023). The goals of SURP are to:
- Help Cal Poly Engineering students develop professionally and enhance their portfolios for future employment.
- Give opportunities for CENG faculty (including lecturers) to advance their research/project agendas over the summer quarter.
- Build lasting student-faculty mentoring relationships
- Provide opportunities for industrial and other external sponsors to work with Cal Poly faculty and students to advance connections, gain access to Cal Poly talent and capabilities, and engage in valuable collaborative activities.
Our Summer 2023 SURP will support over 30 projects (with some projects taking 2 students) for 39 students. You can apply to up to 3 projects on MustangJobs (each project has its own job posting). You need not be in the same department as the faculty advisor to apply to a given project.
Each SURP student participant will receive a CENG Summer Research Grant of $3,500.
Please note that the grant amount is fixed, and additional funding is not available. This grant will be disbursed through the Financial Aid Office toward the end of the summer. Preference will be given to students who have not yet participated in SURP.
This Project
Project Title: Power Text: Exploiting Power Line Side-Channel for Smartphone Text Entry Leakage
Faculty Advisor: Stephen Beard
Faculty Email: srbeard@calpoly.edu
Faculty Department: CSSE/CPE
Number of Students for this project: 1
Touchscreen-based mobile devices, such as smart phones, are integral to many of our lives. They are increasingly responsible for everything from communication to to managing our finances on the go. Unfortunately, their batteries are not infinite and we often we need to charge them on the go as well in places like cars, airports, and offices. While it is well known that this is unsafe, recent work has demonstrated a surprising new attack: namely that an attacker can infer a 4-digit PIN with 99.3% accuracy by simply measuring the power draw from a charging cable while the PIN is entered. By combining the methods of that paper with some cipher based attacks, I believe this attack can be extended to recreating keyboard-based text entry on a smartphone via analysis of the power trace. A team of students is currently recreating the power trace capture and PIN inference systems. This project will extend their work to include text inference. While this project will include elements of signal processing, convolutional neural networks (CNN), and text analysis, students need not have deep familiarity with any of these areas.
HOW TO APPLY:
PLEASE SUBMIT THE FOLLOWING TWO DOCUMENTS VIA HANDSHAKE AND SEE RUBRIC BELOW FOR EVALUATION CRITERIA. YOU CAN APPLY TO UP TO THREE SURP PROJECTS, BUT CAN ONLY BE AWARDED ONE.
- Submit your resume
- Submit a cover letter that answers the following three questions:
- Describe why you are interested in this research project.
- Describe how participating in SURP and working on this research project, will help you advance your academic and professional development goals
- Describe how your past experiences have helped prepare you for your participation in SURP. This includes relevant academic, other formal, and informal preparation.
INCOMPLETE APPLICATIONS COULD DISQUALIFY YOU FROM FURTHER CONSIDERATION.
Note that applications are due April 30; selected students will be notified by no later than May 12.