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Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering >> 2017, Volume 18, Issue 4 doi: 10.1631/FITEE.1500460

Side-channel attacks and learning-vector quantization

Department of Engineering, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Available online: 2017-05-12

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Abstract

The security of cryptographic systems is a major concern for cryptosystem designers, even though cryptography algorithms have been improved. Side-channel attacks, by taking advantage of physical vulnerabilities of cryptosystems, aim to gain secret information. Several approaches have been proposed to analyze side-channel information, among which machine learning is known as a promising method. Machine learning in terms of neural networks learns the signature (power consumption and electromagnetic emission) of an instruction, and then recognizes it automatically. In this paper, a novel experimental investigation was conducted on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), to explore the efficiency of side-channel information characterization based on a learning vector quantization (LVQ) neural network. The main characteristics of LVQ as a multi-class classifier are that it has the ability to learn complex non-linear input-output relationships, use sequential training procedures, and adapt to the data. Experimental results show the performance of multi-class classification based on LVQ as a powerful and promising approach of side-channel data characterization.

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