A Unified and Fully Automated Framework for Wavelet-based Attacks on Random Delay

As a common defense against side-channel attacks, random delay insertion introduces noise into the executive flow of encryption, which increases attack complexity. Accordingly, various techniques are exploited to mitigate the defense effect of such insertions. As an advanced mathematical technique, wavelet analysis is considered to be a more effective technology according to its detailed and comprehensive interpretation of signals. In this paper, we propose a unified and fully automated wavelet-based attack framework (denoted as UWAF), whose data processing is kept within one unified wavelet domain, with three enhanced components: denoising, alignment and key extraction. We put forward a new idea of combining machine learning with wavelet analysis to realize the full automation of the program for attack framework, rendering it possible to search exhaustively for the optimal combination of parameter settings in wavelet transform. Our proposal finds a new setting of wavelet parameters that have not been exploited ever before and achieves the performance enhancement for about 20 times fewer traces required for successful key recovery. UWAF is compared with several mainstream attack frameworks. Experimental results show that it outperforms those counterparts, and can be considered as an effective framework-level solution to defeat the countermeasure of random delay insertion.