Paper 2018/177

On the Use of Independent Component Analysis to Denoise Side-Channel Measurements

Houssem Maghrebi and Emmanuel Prouff

Abstract

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is a powerful technique for blind source separation. It has been successfully applied to signal processing problems, such as feature extraction and noise reduction, in many different areas including medical signal processing and telecommunication. In this work, we propose a framework to apply ICA to denoise side-channel measurements and hence to reduce the complexity of key recovery attacks. Based on several case studies, we afterwards demonstrate the overwhelming advantages of ICA with respect to the commonly used preprocessing techniques such as the singular spectrum analysis. Mainly, we target a software masked implementation of an AES and a hardware unprotected one. Our results show a significant Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) gain which translates into a gain in the number of traces needed for a successful side-channel attack. This states the ICA as an important new tool for the security assessment of cryptographic implementations.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. COSADE 2018
Keywords
independent component analysisside-channel analysispreprocessingnoise filteringcorrelation power analysisBoolean masking scheme
Contact author(s)
houssem mag @ gmail com
History
2018-02-14: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2018/177
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/177,
      author = {Houssem Maghrebi and Emmanuel Prouff},
      title = {On the Use of Independent Component Analysis to Denoise Side-Channel Measurements},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2018/177},
      year = {2018},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/177}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/177}
}
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