AutoPOI: automated points of interest selection for side-channel analysis

Template attacks (TAs) are one of the most powerful side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks. The success of such attacks relies on the effectiveness of the profiling model in modeling the leakage information. A crucial step for TA is to select relevant features from the measured traces, often called points of interest (POIs), to extract the leakage information. Previous research indicates that properly selecting the input leaking features could significantly increase the attack performance. However, due to the presence of SCA countermeasures and advancements in technology nodes, such features become increasingly difficult to extract with conventional approaches such as principle component analysis (PCA) and the Sum Of Squared pairwise T-difference-based method (SOST). This work proposes a framework, AutoPOI, based on proximal policy optimization to automatically find, select and scale down features. The input raw features are first grouped into small regions. The best candidates selected by the framework are further scaled down with an online-optimized dimensionality reduction neural network. Finally, the framework rewards the performance of these features with the results of TA. Based on the experimental results, the proposed framework can extract features automatically that lead to comparable state-of-the-art performance on several commonly used datasets.