Daily Archives: 2015-11-12

Efficient multivariate statistical techniques for extracting secrets from electronic devices

That’s the title of my PhD thesis, supervised by Markus Kuhn, which has become available recently as CL tech report 878:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-878.html

In this thesis I provide a detailed presentation of template attacks, which are considered the most powerful kind of side-channel attacks, and I present several methods for implementing and evaluating this attack efficiently in different scenarios.

These contributions may allow evaluation labs to perform their evaluations faster, show that we can determine almost perfectly an 8-bit target value even when this value is manipulated by a single LOAD instruction (may be the best published results of this kind), and show how to cope with differences across devices, among others.

Some of the datasets used in my experiments along with MATLAB scripts for reproducing my results are available here:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/datasets/grizzly/