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...

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...

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...

AutoPOI: automated points of interest selection for side-channel analysis

Template attacks (TAs) are one of the most powerful side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks. The success of such attacks relies on the effectiveness of the profiling model in modeling the leakage information. A crucial step for TA is to select relevant features from the measured traces, often called points of interest (POIs), to extract the...

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...

The Circle of DL-SCA: Improving Deep Learning-based Side-channel Analysis

For almost three decades, side-channel analysis has represented a realistic and severe threat to embedded devices' security. As a well-known and influential class of implementation attacks, side-channel analysis has been applied against cryptographic implementations, processors, communication systems, and, more recently, machine learning models....