To Overfit, or Not to Overfit: Improving the Performance of Deep Learning-Based SCA

Azade Rezaeezade*, Guilherme Perin, Stjepan Picek

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

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Abstract

Profiling side-channel analysis allows evaluators to estimate the worst-case security of a target. When security evaluations relax the assumptions about the adversary’s knowledge, profiling models may easily be sub-optimal due to the inability to extract the most informative points of interest from the side-channel measurements. When used for profiling attacks, deep neural networks can learn strong models without feature selection with the drawback of expensive hyperparameter tuning. Unfortunately, due to very large search spaces, one usually finds very different model behaviors, and a widespread situation is to face overfitting with typically poor generalization capacity. Usually, overfitting or poor generalization would be mitigated by adding more measurements to the profiling phase to reduce estimation errors. This paper provides a detailed analysis of different deep learning model behaviors and shows that adding more profiling traces as a single solution does not necessarily help improve generalization. We recognize the main problem to be the sub-optimal selection of hyperparameters, which is then difficult to resolve by simply adding more measurements. Instead, we propose to use small hyperparameter tweaks or regularization as techniques to resolve the problem.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProgress in Cryptology - AFRICACRYPT 2022 - 13th International Conference on Cryptology in Africa, AFRICACRYPT 2022, Proceedings
EditorsLejla Batina, Joan Daemen
PublisherSpringer
Pages397-421
Number of pages25
ISBN (Print)978-3-031-17432-2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event13th International Conference on Progress in Cryptology in Africa, AFRICACRYPT 2022 - Fes, Morocco
Duration: 18 Jul 202220 Jul 2022

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume13503 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference13th International Conference on Progress in Cryptology in Africa, AFRICACRYPT 2022
Country/TerritoryMorocco
CityFes
Period18/07/2220/07/22

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Deep learning
  • Generalization
  • Overfitting
  • Side-channel analysis

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