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...

Gambling for Success: The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis in Deep Learning-Based Side-Channel Analysis

Deep learning-based side-channel analysis (SCA) represents a strong approach for profiling attacks. Still, this does not mean it is trivial to find neural networks that perform well for any setting. Based on the developed neural network architectures, we can distinguish between small neural networks that are easier to tune and less prone to...

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...

Reinforcement Learning-Based Design of Side-Channel Countermeasures

Deep learning-based side-channel attacks are capable of breaking targets protected with countermeasures. The constant progress in the last few years makes the attacks more powerful, requiring fewer traces to break a target. Unfortunately, to protect against such attacks, we still rely solely on methods developed to protect against generic...

Focus is Key to Success: A Focal Loss Function for Deep Learning-Based Side-Channel Analysis

The deep learning-based side-channel analysis represents one of the most powerful side-channel attack approaches. Thanks to its capability in dealing with raw features and countermeasures, it becomes the de facto standard approach for the SCA community. The recent works significantly improved the deep learning-based attacks from various...

On the Evaluation of Deep Learning-Based Side-Channel Analysis

Deep learning-based side-channel analysis is rapidly positioning itself as a de-facto standard for the most powerful profiling side-channel analysis.The results from the last few years show that deep learning techniques can efficiently break targets that are even protected with countermeasures. While there are constant improvements in making...

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....

On the Importance of Pooling Layer Tuning for Profiling Side-Channel Analysis

In recent years, the advent of deep neural networks opened new perspectives for security evaluations with side-channel analysis. Profiling attacks now benefit from capabilities offered by convolutional neural networks, such as dimensionality reduction and the inherent ability to reduce the trace desynchronization effects. These neural...