Remove Some Noise: On Pre-processing of Side-channel Measurements with Autoencoders

• Main Authors: Lichao Wu, Stjepan Picek
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ruhr-Universität Bochum 2020-08-01
• Series: Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
• Subjects: side-channel analysis; Deep learning; Noise; Countermeasures; Denoising autoencoder
• Online Access: https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/8688

In the profiled side-channel analysis, deep learning-based techniques proved to be very successful even when attacking targets protected with countermeasures. Still, there is no guarantee that deep learning attacks will always succeed. Various countermeasures make attacks significantly more complex, and such countermeasures can be further combined to make the attacks even more challenging. An intuitive solution to improve the performance of attacks would be to reduce the effect of countermeasures. This paper investigates whether we can consider certain types of hiding countermeasures as noise and then use a deep learning technique called the denoising autoencoder to remove that noise. We conduct a detailed analysis of six different types of noise and countermeasures separately or combined and show that denoising autoencoder improves the attack performance significantly.