Practical Approaches Toward Deep-Learning-Based Cross-Device Power Side-Channel Attack

Power side-channel analysis (SCA) has been of immense interest to most embedded designers to evaluate the physical security of the system. This work presents profiling-based cross-device power SCA attacks using deep-learning techniques on 8-bit AVR microcontroller devices running AES-128. First, we show the practical issues that arise in these profiling-based cross-device attacks due to significant device-to-device variations. Second, we show that utilizing principal component analysis (PCA)-based preprocessing and multidevice training, a multilayer perceptron (MLP)-based 256-class classifier can achieve an average accuracy of 99.43% in recovering the first keybyte from all the 30 devices in our data set, even in the presence of significant interdevice variations. Results show that the designed MLP with PCA-based preprocessing outperforms a convolutional neural network (CNN) with four-device training by ~20% in terms of the average test accuracy of cross-device attack for the aligned traces captured using the ChipWhisperer hardware. Finally, to extend the practicality of these cross-device attacks, another preprocessing step, namely, dynamic time warping (DTW) has been utilized to remove any misalignment among the traces, before performing PCA. DTW along with PCA followed by the 256-class MLP classifier provides ≥10.97% higher accuracy than the CNN-based approach for cross-device attack even in the presence of up to 50 time-sample misalignments between the traces.