When Theory Meets Practice: A Framework for Robust Profiled Side-channel Analysis

Stjepan Picek (1) , Annelie Heuser (2) , Cesare Alippi (3, 4) , Francesco Regazzoni (5)

1 TU Delft - Delft University of Technology
2 TAMIS - Threat Analysis and Mitigation for Information Security
3 USI - Università della Svizzera italiana = University of Italian Switzerland
4 ICT Institute of Politecnico di Milano
5 Faculty of Informatics [Lugano]

Profiled side-channel attacks are the most powerful attacks and they consist of two steps. The adversary first builds a leakage model, using a device similar to the target one, then it exploits this leakage model to extract the secret information from the victim's device. These attacks can be seen as a classification problem, where the adversary needs to decide to what class (corresponding to the secret key) the traces collected from the victim's devices belong to. For a number of years, the research community studied profiled attacks and proposed numerous improvements. Despite a large number of empirical works, a framework with strong theoretical foundations to address profiled side-channel attacks is still missing. In this paper, we propose a framework capable of modeling and evaluating all profiled analysis attacks. This framework is based on the expectation estimation problem that has strong theoretical foundations. Next, we quantify the effects of perturbations injected at different points in our framework through robustness analysis where the perturbations represent sources of uncertainty associated with measurements, non-optimal classifiers, and methods. Finally, we experimentally validate our framework using publicly available traces, different classifiers, and performance metrics.

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Stjepan Picek, Annelie Heuser, Cesare Alippi, Francesco Regazzoni. When Theory Meets Practice: A Framework for Robust Profiled Side-channel Analysis. 2019. ⟨hal-02010603⟩