Power analysis attack: an approach based on machine learning

Abstract

In cryptography, a side-channel attack is any attack based on the analysis of measurements related to the physical implementation of a cryptosystem. Nowadays, the possibility of collecting a large amount of observations paves the way to the adoption of machine learning techniques, i.e., techniques able to extract information and patterns from large datasets. The use of statistical techniques for side-channel attacks is not new. Techniques like the template attack have shown their effectiveness in recent years. However, these techniques rely on parametric assumptions and are often limited to small dimensionality settings, which limit their range of application. This paper explores the use of machine learning techniques to relax such assumptions and to deal with high dimensional feature vectors.