CDAE: Towards Empowering Denoising in Side-Channel Analysis

Abstract

Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) plays a crucial role in hardware security evaluation. However, side-channel acquisitions (a.k.a. traces) usually contain noises that often impose negative effects on key-recovery efficiency. In this paper, we propose convolutional denoising autoencoder (CDAE) for noise reduction in SCA. CDAE is composed of multiple layers of convolution operators, learning an end-to-end mapping from noisy traces to clean traces by minimizing the \(\ell _2\) loss of noisy-clean trace pairs. The convolutional layers capture the abstraction of the traces while eliminating noises. We argue that CDAE is very suitable for profiled SCA especially when the attacker has a large amount of traces in the offline profiling phase. Once the network training is done, our denoising network can be applied to individual new noisy traces for the attacker to launch online attacks. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we train CDAE to denoise traces and then perform Template Attacks (TA) in three high noise jamming scenarios, including unprotected (GPU and FPGA based) and protected (MCU based) AES implementations. Our method can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) denoising method on both information theoretic metrics and security metrics. Results show that CDAE achieves at least \(\sim 4\times \) Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) gain, thus TA with denoising preprocessing requires at most 50% of the traces in the attack phase.