Paper 2012/082

Semi-Supervised Template Attack

Liran Lerman and Stephane Fernandes Medeiros and Nikita Veshchikov and Cedric Meuter and Gianluca Bontempi and Olivier Markowitch

Abstract

Side channel attacks take advantage of the information leakage in a cryptographic device. A template attack is a family of side channel attacks which is reputed to be extremely effective. This kind of attacks supposes that the attacker can fully control a cryptographic device before attacking a similar one. In this paper, we propose a method based on a semi-supervised learning strategy to relax this assumption. The effectiveness of our proposal is confirmed by software simulations as well as by experiments on a 8-bit microcontroller.