Paper 2016/921

Breaking Cryptographic Implementations Using Deep Learning Techniques

Houssem Maghrebi, Thibault Portigliatti, and Emmanuel Prouff

Abstract

Template attack is the most common and powerful profiled side channel attack. It relies on a realistic assumption regarding the noise of the device under attack: the probability density function of the data is a multivariate Gaussian distribution. To relax this assumption, a recent line of research has investigated new profiling approaches mainly by applying machine learning techniques. The obtained results are commensurate, and in some particular cases better, compared to template attack. In this work, we propose to continue this recent line of research by applying more sophisticated profiling techniques based on deep learning. Our experimental results confirm the overwhelming advantages of the resulting new attacks when targeting both unprotected and protected cryptographic implementations.