It's Not Just a Phase: On Investigating Phase Transitions in Deep Learning-based Side-channel Analysis

Sengim Karayalcin, Marina Krček, Stjepan Picek

Abstract:

Side-channel analysis (SCA) represents a realistic threat where the attacker can observe unintentional information to obtain secret data.
Evaluation labs also use the same SCA techniques in the process of security certification.
The results in the last decade have shown that machine learning, especially deep learning, is an extremely powerful SCA approach, allowing the breaking of protected devices while achieving optimal attack performance.
Unfortunately, deep learning operates as a black-box, making it less useful for security evaluators who must understand how attacks work to prevent them in the future.
This work demonstrates that mechanistic interpretability can effectively scale to realistic scenarios where relevant information is sparse and well-defined interchange interventions to the input are impossible due to side-channel protections.
Concretely, we reverse engineer the features the network learns during phase transitions, eventually retrieving secret masks, allowing us to move from black-box to white-box evaluation.

Primary Area: Applications->Everything Else

Keywords: Neural Networks, Explainability, Side-channel Analysis

Application-Driven Machine Learning: This submission is on Application-Driven Machine Learning.

Submission Number: 16179