Paper 2025/560 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/560 ↗

Jump, It Is Easy: JumpReLU Activation Function in Deep Learning-based Side-channel Analysis

Abstract

Deep learning-based side-channel analysis has become a popular and powerful option for side-channel attacks in recent years. One of the main directions that the side-channel community explores is how to design efficient architectures that can break the targets with as little as possible attack traces, but also how to consistently build such architectures. In this work, we explore the usage of the JumpReLU activation function, which was designed to improve the robustness of neural networks. Intuitively speaking, improving the robustness seems a natural requirement for side-channel analysis, as hiding countermeasures could be considered adversarial attacks. In our experiments, we explore three strategies: 1) exchanging the activation functions with JumpReLU at the inference phase, training common side-channel architectures with JumpReLU, and 3) conducting hyperparameter search with JumpReLU as the activation function. While the first two options do not yield improvements in results (but also do not show worse performance), the third option brings advantages, especially considering the number of neural networks that break the target. As such, we conclude that using JumpReLU is a good option to improve the stability of attack results.