Paper 2021/959

The Best of Two Worlds: Deep Learning-assisted Template Attack

Lichao Wu, Guilherme Perin, and Stjepan Picek

Abstract

In the last decade, machine learning-based side-channel attacks have become a standard option when investigating profiling side-channel attacks. At the same time, the previous state-of-the-art technique, template attack, started losing its importance and was more considered a baseline to compare against. As such, most of the results reported that machine learning (and especially deep learning) could significantly outperform the template attack. Nevertheless, the template attack still has certain advantages even compared to deep learning. The most significant one is that it has only a few hyperparameters to tune, making it easier to use. We take another look at the template attack, and we devise a feature engineering phase allowing the template attack to compete or even outperform state-of-the-art deep learning-based side-channel attacks. More precisely, with a novel distance metric customized for side-channel analysis, we show how a deep learning technique called similarity learning can be used to find highly efficient embeddings of input data with one-epoch training, which can then be fed into the template attack resulting in powerful attacks.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
Side-channel AnalysisSimilarity learningTriplet networkDeep learningTemplate attack
Contact author(s)
wlc9399 @ gmail com
guilhermeperin7 @ gmail com
picek stjepan @ gmail com
History
2022-02-08: revised
2021-07-22: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2021/959
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/959,
      author = {Lichao Wu and Guilherme Perin and Stjepan Picek},
      title = {The Best of Two Worlds: Deep Learning-assisted Template Attack},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/959},
      year = {2021},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/959}
}
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