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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30105 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30105/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Generalized Power Attacks against Crypto Hardware using Long-Range Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07249/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.