Unsupervised Attacks
Cécile Dumas · 2025
This chapter covers side channel attacks during execution of the targeted embedded cryptographic implementation, when such signals are obtained solely from the evaluated product via auxiliary channels. In contrast to the supervised attacks, these attacks are referred to as unsupervised attacks . Unsupervised attacks, which appeared upstream of supervised attacks at the end of the 20th century, operate on the same principles, except that they rely solely on signals acquired from the target component. The absence of profiling means that, unlike supervised attacks, experiments cannot be used to directly estimate a possible generative or discrimative model. If the predicted model is linear, correlation power analysis is an attack that requires few assumptions and has low computational complexity. The use of likelihood will be of interest in the case of a linear model in each of the bits. In other cases, mutual information analysis is an appropriate tool.