Reinforcement Learning for Profiled Side-Channel Analysis: Applications of Q-Learning in the SCA Domain

Side-channel attacks (SCA), which use unintended leakage to retrieve a secret cryptographic key, have become more sophisticated over time. With the recent successes of machine learning (ML) and especially deep learning (DL) techniques against cryptographic implementations even in the presence of dedicated countermeasures, various methods have...

Loss functions for profiled side-channel analysis: An analysis of loss functions and the application of multi­-loss functions for deep learning in the SCA domain

Deep learning techniques have become the tool of choice for side-channel analysis. In recent years, neural networks like multi-layer perceptrons and convolutional neural networks have proven to be the most powerful instruments for performing side-channel analysis. Recent work on this topic has focused on different aspects of these techniques,...

Pre-Silicon Power Leakage Assessment Framework using Generative Adversarial Networks

As of 2021, the world economic forum deems cyber-security failures as one of the most potent threats to the world. According to a McAfee report, the cost of cybercrimes in 2020 reached nearly 1 trillion US dollars, which was around 50 percent more than what it was in 2018. Exacerbating the already mammoth financial implication of such a failure...

Hardware-based implementations in Side-Channel Analysis: A comparison study of DL SCA attacks against HW and SW AES and a novel methodology

Side-Channel Attacks (SCA) attempt to recover the secret cryptographic key from an electronic device by exploiting the unintended physical leakages of said device. With the devices that are being attacked becoming more sophisticated, so is SCA. In the past few years, the focus of the research in the field of SCA shifted towards the application...

Unsupervised Deep Learning-based Side-channel Analysis

Side-channel attacks (SCA) play a crucial role in assessing the security of the implementation of cryp- tographic algorithms. Still, traditional profiled attacks require a nearly identical reference device to the target, limiting their practicality. This thesis focuses on non-profiled SCA, which provides a re- alistic alternative when the...