A Simple Transformer Pipeline for Full-Key Side-Channel Attacks on Uncropped Datasets

arXiv:2608.30105 · cs.CR, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-31 · Read on arXiv

cs.CR, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-31

Updated: 2026-08-31

Comments: Accepted to the OPTIMIST Workshop '26 at CHES 2026. 6 pages, 1 figure. Code can be found at https://github.com/jimgammell/simple-transformer-pipeline-for-sca

Code: https://github.com/jimgammell/simple-transformer-pipeline-for-sca

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Deep learning-based side-channel analysis has historically focused on single-byte targets and manually cropped traces, which risks discarding exploitable leakage.

Terminology

Abstract

Deep learning-based side-channel analysis has historically focused on single-byte targets and manually cropped traces, which risks discarding exploitable leakage. While recent work has proposed specialized architectures and resampling techniques to address this gap, the literature lacks a simple transformer baseline for simultaneous full-key attacks on uncropped traces. We present an open-source transformer implementation for uncropped full-key attacks which uses the standard transformer encoder backbone, adapting only the input and output layers to the side-channel setting. We release our implementation, training recipes, and pretrained weights for uncropped ASCADv1f, ASCADv1r, and CHES-CTF-2018 which achieve performance competitive with previously-reported results, while using less than 10GB of VRAM and requiring at most 3.34 hours of training on a single NVIDIA A6000.

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