Title
SCAUL: Power Side-Channel Analysis With Unsupervised Learning
Abstract
Existing power analysis techniques rely on strong adversary models with prior knowledge of the leakage or training data. We introduce side-channel analysis with unsupervised learning (SCAUL) that can recover the secret key without requiring prior knowledge or profiling (training). We employ an LSTM auto-encoder to extract features from power traces with high mutual information with the data-dependent samples of the measurements. We demonstrate that by replacing the raw measurements with the auto-encoder features in a classical DPA attack, the efficiency, in terms of required number of measurements for key recovery, improves by 10X. Further, we employ these features to identify a leakage model with sensitivity analysis and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) networks. SCAUL uses the auto-encoder features and the leakage model, obtained in an unsupervised approach, to find the correct key. On a lightweight implementation of AES on Artix-7 FPGA, we show that SCAUL is able to recover the correct key with 3,700 power measurements with random plaintexts, while a DPA attack requires at least 17,400 measurements. Using misaligned traces, with an uncertainty equal to 20 percent of the hardware clock cycle, SCAUL is able to recover the secret key with 12,300 measurements while the DPA attack fails to detect the key.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TC.2020.3013196
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Keywords
DocType
Volume
LSTM auto-encoder,power analysis,sensitivity analysis,side-channel analysis,unsupervised learning
Journal
69
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
11
0018-9340
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.42
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ramezanpour Keyvan130.42
Paul Ampadu228528.55
William Diehl3113.34