Unai Rioja

I am a researcher at IKERLAN, a Technological Research Center located in the Basque Country (Spain), where I reside. I obtained a Degree in Industrial Electronics and Automation Engineering in 2017, and a Master's Degree in Industrial Engineering in 2019, both from the University of La Rioja. In July 2018, I started working in the industrial cybersecurity specialisation team at IKERLAN, in the area of reliable embedded systems. In parallel, in 2019, I became a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Lejla Batina in the Digital Security group of Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. In November 2022, I obtained the degree of doctor working on Side-channel analysis attacks. I am currently working in the IKERLAN Embedded Cybersecurity specialisation group, performing cybersecure product design and evaluation tasks.

Contact Information

Education

Publications

Link to Google Scholar

PhD Thesis

Unai Rioja. Unraveling Side-Channel Analysis: Efficient evaluation of embedded devices against (portable) profiling attacks. 2022 [link]

International Journals

• Unai Rioja, Servio Paguada, Lejla Batina and Igor Armendariz. The uncertainty of Side-Channel Analysis: A way to leverage from heuristics. J. Emerg. Technol. Comput. Syst. 17, 3, Article 40 (May 2021) [link]
• Unai Rioja, Lejla Batina, Jose Luis Flores and Igor Armendariz. Auto-tune POIs: Estimation of distribution algorithms for efficient side-channel analysis. Computer Networks, Volume 198 (October 2021). [link]
• Unai Rioja, Lejla Batina, Igor Armendariz and Jose Luis Flores. Towards Human Dependency Elimination: AI Approach to SCA Robustness Assessment. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (May 2022). [link]

Conference proceedings

• Unai Rioja, Lejla Batina and Igor Armendariz. When Similarities Among Devices are Taken for Granted: Another Look at Portability. Progress in Cryptology - AFRICACRYPT 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12174. pp. 337-357. [link]
• Servio Paguada, Unai Rioja and Igor Armendariz. Controlling the Deep Learning-Based Side-Channel Analysis: A Way to Leverage from Heuristics. ACNS 2020: Applied Cryptography and Network Security Workshops pp. 106-125. [link]
• Unai Rioja, Lejla Batina, Jose Luis Flores and Igor Armendariz. Towards automatic and portable data loading template attacks on microcontrollers. 2021 22nd International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED'21), pp. 437-443 [link]

Book Chapters

Marina Krcek, Huimin Li, Servio Paguada, Unai Rioja, Lichao Wu, Guilherme Perin, and Lukasz Chmielewski. Deep Learning on Side-Channel Analysis. In: Security and Artificial Intelligence: A Crossdisciplinary Approach. Ed. by Lejla Batina, Thomas Bäck, Ileana Buhan, and Stjepan Picek. Springer International Publishing, 2022

Preprints (Submitted to journal)

• Unai Rioja, Lejla Batina, Igor Armendariz and Jose Luis Flores. Keep It Unbiased: A Comparison Between Estimation of Distribution Algorithms and Deep Learning for Human Interaction-Free Side-Channel Analysis. 2021, arXiv, abs/2111.13425. [link]