Reinforcement learning for hyperparameter tuning in deep learning-based side-channel analysis

Deep learning represents a powerful set of techniques for profiling side-channel analysis. The results in the last few years show that neural network architectures like multilayer perceptron and convolutional neural networks give strong attack performance where it is possible to break targets protected with various coun-termeasures....

The Best of Two Worlds: Deep Learning-assisted Template Attack

In the last decade, machine learning-based side-channel attacks have become a standard option when investigating profiling side-channel attacks. At the same time, the previous state-of-the-art technique, template attack, started losing its importance and was more considered a baseline to compare against. As such, most of the results reported...

Exploring Feature Selection Scenarios for Deep Learning-based Side-channel Analysis

One of the main promoted advantages of deep learning in profiling side-channel analysis is the possibility of skipping the feature engineering process. Despite that, most recent publications consider feature selection as the attacked interval from the side-channel measurements is pre-selected. This is similar to the worst-case security...

The Need for Speed: A Fast Guessing Entropy Calculation for Deep Learning-Based SCA

The adoption of deep neural networks for profiling side-channel attacks opened new perspectives for leakage detection. Recent publications showed that cryptographic implementations featuring different countermeasures could be broken without feature selection or trace preprocessing. This success comes with a high price: an extensive...

SoK: Deep Learning-based Physical Side-channel Analysis

Side-channel attacks represent a realistic and serious threat to the security of embedded devices for already almost three decades. A variety of attacks and targets they can be applied to have been introduced, and while the area of side-channel attacks and their mitigation is very well-researched, it is yet to be consolidated. Deep learning...

Label Correlation in Deep Learning-Based Side-Channel Analysis

The efficiency of the profiling side-channel analysis can be significantly improved with machine learning techniques. Although powerful, a fundamental machine learning limitation of being data-hungry received little attention in the side-channel community. In practice, the maximum number of leakage traces that evaluators/attackers can obtain is...

No (good) loss no gain: Systematic evaluation of loss functions in deep learning-based side-channel analysis

Deep learning is a powerful direction for profiling side-channel analysis as it can break targets protected with countermeasures even with a relatively small number of attack traces. Still, it is necessary to conduct hyperparameter tuning to reach strong attack performance, which can be far from trivial. Besides many options stemming from the...