Template attack versus Bayes classifier

Abstract

Side-channel attacks represent one of the most powerful categories of attacks on cryptographic devices with profiled attacks in a prominent place as the most powerful among them. Indeed, for instance, template attack is a well-known real-world attack that is also the most powerful attack from the information theoretical perspective. On the other hand, machine learning techniques have proved their quality in a numerous applications where one is definitely side-channel analysis. As one could expect, most of the research concerning supervised machine learning and side-channel analyses concentrated on more powerful machine learning techniques. Although valid from the practical perspective, such attacks often remain lacking from the more theoretical side. In this paper, we investigate several Bayes classifiers, which present simple supervised techniques that have significant similarities with the template attack. More specifically, our analysis aims to investigate what is the influence of the feature (in)dependence in datasets with different amount of noise and to offer further insight into the efficiency of machine learning for side-channel analysis.