[jacquesm]

Hm. Not an expert on the subject but I think by some readings of that you could consider it to be one. After all, if you duplicate the setup you're going to bug that gives you exactly the same kind of advantage that a template attack gives you, one where you have many more samples than you'd have if all you had to use was the target itself. You could even try to parallelize this to determine sensitivity to conditions by creating a number of setups all slight variations on the target. This should help to establish how reliable the output of the actual side-channel is.