BPPF: a bilinear plaintext-power fusion method for enhanced profiling side-channel analysis

Deep learning algorithms are increasingly employed to exploit side-channel information, such as power consumption and electromagnetic leakage from hardware devices, significantly enhancing attack capabilities. However, relying solely on power traces for side-channel information often requires adequate domain knowledge. To address this limitation, this work proposes a new attack scheme. Firstly, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based plaintext-extended bilinear feature fusion model is designed. Secondly, multi-model intermediate layers are fused and trained, yielding in the increase of the amount of effective information and generalization ability. Finally, the model is employed to predict the output probability of three public side-channel datasets (e.g. ASCAD, AES \(\_\) $\_$ HD, and AES \(\_\) $\_$ RD), and analyze the recovery key guessing entropy for each key to efficiently assess attack efficiency. Experimental results showcase that the plaintext-extended bilinear feature fusion model can effectively enhance the Side-Channel Attack (SCA) capabilities and prediction performance. Deploying the proposed method, the number of traces required for a successful attack on the ASCAD \(\_\) $\_$ R dataset is significantly reduced to less than 914, representing an 70.5% reduction in traces compared to the network in Convolutional Neural Network-Visual Geometry Group (CNN_VGG16) with plaintext, which incorporating plaintext features before the fully connected layer. Compared to existing solutions, the proposed scheme requires only 80% of the power traces for the attack mask design using only 75 epochs. As a result, the power of the proposed method is well proved through the different experiments and comparison processes.