CHES 2015: Evaluation and Improvement of Generic-Emulating DPA Attacks

On Tuesday afternoon at the ‘Palais Grand Large’ (or, as my long-unrehearsed school-level French childishly insists on translating it, the ‘Big Fat Palace’), Weijia Wang presented ‘Evaluation and Improvement of Generic-Emulating DPA Attacks’. This paper (joint work with Yu Yu, Junrong Liu, Zheng Guo, François-Xavier Standaert, Dawu Gu, Sen Xu and Rong Fu) is of particular interest to me as it builds on work done in part at Bristol and presented at CT-RSA 2014 ([WOS2014]; ePrint).

‘Generic DPA’ attacks -- methods which succeed against an arbitrary physical implementation without the need to meaningfully characterise the power model -- have been hotly pursued in the side-channel literature. However, it has been shown ([WOS2014]) that all such proposals rely on noninjectivity of the target function (among other properties) to succeed. Attacks against injective targets necessarily fail unless provided with some compressing mapping corresponding meaningfully to something about the true leakage of the specific device. 

We introduced the notion of ‘generic-emulating DPA’ to enable key recovery attacks against injective functions such as the AES S-Box requiring only some minimal intuition about the form of the leakage. The instantiation we presented used stepwise linear regression to find the key hypothesis producing the most ‘simply explained’ model for the measured leakages (see [WOS2014] for details).

Wang et al. experiment further with our proof-of-concept example and show that the stepwise approach is unstable in small samples. They suggest two alternatives -- ridge-based and lasso-based regression -- which perform better in practice. Against low degree leakage functions, the best difference-of-means (DoM) attacks outperform all three tested generic-emulating methods. However, against complex leakages (for example, a polynomial in eight target bits comprised only of terms of degree 5 and above) their proposals demonstrate an advantage.

They also incorporate cross-validation into their strategies, which is shown to further improve outcomes so that even against typical smartcard leakages the ridge-based and lasso-based approaches begin to rival the best DoM attacks. The question and answer session drew attention to the computational cost of such methods relative to (cheap) DoM, but the authors were keen to stress that this was not prohibitive. Whilst no thoroughly convincing application scenario has yet been discovered for generic-emulating DPA, it is interesting to see further progress from our basic suggestion into more practical territory.


[WOS2014]: The Myth of Generic DPA … and the Magic of Learning, Carolyn Whitnall, Elisabeth Oswald, François-Xavier Standaert, CT-RSA 2014, vol 8366 LNCS pp 183-205.