![](bg6.png)
ground noise, which could make the side channel in-
feasible, or at least far more difficult to interpret.
We have performed initial testing with some back-
ground noise conditions, and the results are visually
quite similar to the ideal case. However, a far more
extensive exploration should be done before draw-
ing any conclusions about the effectiveness of this
side channel in a typical enterprise computing envi-
ronment with multiple servers running. To explore
this further, we intend to repeat similar experiments
with various tasks running in the background on vir-
tual machines on other servers. By steadily increasing
the background noise during the experiment, we can
identify at what point the side channel becomes sig-
nificantly noisier, or altogether infeasible.
5.2 Covert Channel
Related to side channel investigations, future work
could also explore the viability of creating a covert
communication channel via power analysis. Given
the experimental results achieved so far, it is possi-
ble that information could be encoded using the high
and low states seen in the spectrogram. With an ap-
propriate encoding scheme, a relatively efficient sys-
tem could be designed to covertly transmit informa-
tion by modulating the power consumption such that
the high and low states represent binary data. The
communication rate could be enhanced by using a
ternary encoding scheme, where the power consump-
tion is modulated between three states, corresponding
to: idle, 50%, and 100% CPU utilization. While we
did perform some testing of this idea (as seen in figure
6), we intend to design further experiments, and in-
vestigate encoding schemes and data processing tech-
niques for extracting information from the signal, in
order to more thoroughly investigate the viability of
the concept.
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