Double Strike: Breaking Approximation-Based Side-Channel Countermeasures for DNNs

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs), which support services such as driving assistants and medical diagnoses, undergo lengthy and expensive training procedures. Therefore, the training's outcome - the DNN weights - represents a significant intellectual property asset to protect. Side-channel analysis (SCA) has recently appeared as an effective approach to recover this confidential asset from DNN implementations. In response, researchers have proposed to defend DNN implementations through classic side-channel countermeasures, at the cost of higher energy consumption, inference time, and resource utilisation. Following a different approach, Ding et al. (HOST'25) introduced MACPRUNING, a novel SCA countermeasure based on pruning, a performance-oriented Approximate Computing technique: at inference time, the implementation randomly prunes (or skips) non-important weights (i.e., with low contribution to the DNN's accuracy) of the first layer, exponentially increasing the side-channel resilience of the protected DNN implementation. However, the original security analysis of MACPRUNING did not consider a control-flow dependency intrinsic to the countermeasure design. This dependency may allow an attacker to circumvent MACPRUNING and recover the weights important to the DNN's accuracy. This paper describes a preprocessing methodology to exploit the above-mentioned control-flow dependency. Through practical experiments on a Chipwhisperer-Lite running a MACPRUNING-protected Multi-Layer Perceptron, we target the first 8 weights of each neuron and recover 96% of the important weights, demonstrating the drastic reduction in security of the protected implementation. Moreover, we show how microarchitectural leakage improves the effectiveness of our methodology, even allowing for the recovery of up to 100% of the targeted non-important weights. Lastly, by adapting our methodology [continue in pdf].