How to Compare Profiled Side-Channel Attacks?

Abstract. Side-channel attacks are an important class of attacks against cryptographic devices and profiled side-channel attacks are the most powerful type of side-channel attacks. In this scenario, an adversary first uses a device under his control in order to build a good leakage model. Then, he takes advantage of this leakage model to exploit the actual leakages of a similar target device and perform a key recovery. Since such attacks are divided in two phases (namely profiling and online at-tack), the question of how to best evaluate those two phases arises. In this paper, we take advantage of a recently introduced framework for the analysis of side-channel attacks to tackle this issue. We show that the quality of a profiling phase is nicely captured by an information the-oretic metric. By contrast, the effectiveness of the online key recovery phase is better measured with a security metric. As an illustration, we use this methodology to compare the two main techniques for profiled side-channel attacks, namely template attacks and stochastic models. Our results confirm the higher profiling efficiency of stochastic models when reasonable assumptions can be made about the leakages of a device.