Leo sat in his dimly lit room, the blue glow of his dual monitors illuminating a half-finished cityscape. He was a "modder"—someone who didn’t just play games but rewrote them. For months, he had been meticulously crafting Neo-Haven , an expansive, neon-soaked cyberpunk district for a popular open-world game.
Introduction Side-channel communication (SCC) leverages unintended information leakage to create covert channels for data exfiltration or cross-domain signaling. SideModCom structures SCC into interchangeable modules to (a) clarify design space, (b) enable systematic analysis and comparison, and (c) guide mitigation. This paper contributes: a taxonomy of SCC modules; a reference architecture; attacker/defender models; metrics for capacity, detectability, and robustness; exemplar channel constructions across classes; and mitigation guidance.
"Sidemodcom" is named for its physical orientation. Modules attach to the side of the host device, allowing for daisy-chaining. One host can support up to 16 sidemodcom modules in a star or linear topology. This transforms a static desktop into a living, growing ecosystem of compute resources.
