Deadline for the Special Issue "An Information-Theoretic Approach to Side-Channel Analysis" is Extended!

New submission deadline: 31 October 2025

Guest Editors: Dr. Wei Cheng, Prof. Sylvain Guilley, Prof. Patrick Solé and Prof. Olivier Rioul

Submit to the Special Issue: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/Inf_Side_channel_Anal

Special Issue Information: Processing sensitive data—personal information, PII, cryptographic keys and tokens, etc.—requires great caution because of potential information theft or manipulation. One classical adversarial method to achieve information extraction is to leverage side-channels. Side-channel analyses are as old as the classified "tempest" interception, aiming at spying at screens and keyboards. Then, timing attacks were put forth in 1996, followed by power analysis attacks in 1999. Such devastating attacks gave rise to several security certification schemes, such as Common Criteria and NIST FIPS 140 referentials. Recently, the Spectre and Meltdown side-channel attacks have renewed the interest in such analyses.

Side-channel attacks compromise systems’ security. They are mostly undetectable due to their stealthy behavior. Their risk is thus extremely high, and it is paramount to understand them well. This is all the more true as countermeasures can be designed. Such countermeasures cost resources and are expected to be efficient. However, an important issue is how to rate them, even assuming the worst case of the most powerful attacker. For all these reasons, formally capturing side-channel analyses is a necessary prerequisite.

Information theory seems to be the most suitable framework for this task, because it is general and it is capable of tolerating abstractions. It also encompasses several relevant security metrics, such as leakage measurement, attack success rate, and guessing entropy. In this Special Issue, we invite submissions of original works pursuing such effort.

List of topics:

We welcome contributions on the following topics.

Theoretical frameworks for side-channel analysis;

New mathematical descriptions of side-channels;

Information-theoretic measures for information leakage;

Tight bounds on the efficiency of attacks and countermeasures;

Quantitative methods to detect or measure information leakage;

Practical analysis results on use-cases;

Novel paradigms for modeling side-channel analyses.