International Association
for Cryptologic Research

<p>Profiling side-channel analysis has gained widespread acceptance in both academic and industrial realms due to its robust capacity to unveil protected secrets, even in the presence of countermeasures. To harness this capability, an adversary must access a clone of the target device to acquire profiling measurements, labeling them with leakage models. The challenge of finding an effective leakage model, especially for a protected dataset with a low signal-to-noise ratio or weak correlation between actual leakages and labels, often necessitates an intuitive engineering approach, as otherwise, the attack will not perform well.</p><p>In this paper, we introduce a deep learning approach with a flexible leakage model, referred to as the multi-bit model. Instead of trying to learn a pre-determined representation of the target intermediate data, we utilize the concept of the stochastic model to decompose the label into bits. Then, the deep learning model is used to classify each bit independently. This versatile multi-bit model can adjust to existing leakage models like the Hamming weight and Most Significant Bit while also possessing the flexibility to adapt to complex leakage scenarios. To further improve the attack efficiency, we extend the multi-bit model to profile all 16 subkey bytes simultaneously, which requires negligible computational effort. The experimental results show that the proposed methods can efficiently break all key bytes across four considered datasets while the conventional leakage models fail. Our work signifies a significant step forward in deep learning-based side-channel attacks, showcasing a high degree of flexibility and efficiency with the proposed leakage model. </p>