Paper 2016/1024

LDA-Based Clustering as a Side-Channel Distinguisher

Rauf Mahmudlu, Valentina Banciu, Lejla Batina, and Ileana Buhan

Abstract

Side-channel attacks put the security of the implementations of cryptographic algorithms under threat. Secret information can be recovered by analyzing the physical measurements acquired during the computations and using key recovery distinguishing functions to guess the best candidate. Several generic and model based distinguishers have been proposed in the literature. In this work we describe two contributions that lead to better performance of side-channel attacks in challenging scenarios. First, we describe how to transform the physical leakage traces into a new space where the noise reduction is near-optimal. Second, we propose a new generic distinguisher that is based upon minimal assumptions. It approaches a key distinguishing task as a problem of classification and ranks the key candidates according to the separation among the leakage traces. We also provide experiments and compare their results to those of the Correlation Power Analysis (CPA). Our results show that the proposed method can indeed reach better success rates even in the presence of significant amount of noise.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Proceedings of RFIDsec 2016
Keywords
Side-Channel AnalysisData TransformationLinear Discriminant AnalysisDifferential Power AnalysisElectro-Magnetic RadiationSignal to Noise Ratio
Contact author(s)
raufmahmudlu @ gmail com
History
2016-11-01: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/1024
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/1024,
      author = {Rauf Mahmudlu and Valentina Banciu and Lejla Batina and Ileana Buhan},
      title = {LDA-Based Clustering as a Side-Channel Distinguisher},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2016/1024},
      year = {2016},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1024}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1024}
}
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