[Resource Topic] 2023/1084: A Side-Channel Attack on a Masked Hardware Implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber

Welcome to the resource topic for 2023/1084

Title:
A Side-Channel Attack on a Masked Hardware Implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber

Authors: Yanning Ji, Elena Dubrova

Abstract:

NIST has recently selected CRYSTALS-Kyber as a new public key encryption and key establishment algorithm to be standardized. This makes it important to evaluate the resistance of CRYSTALS-Kyber implementations to side-channel attacks. Software implementations of CRYSTALS-Kyber have already been thoroughly analysed. The discovered vulnerabilities helped improve the subsequently released versions and promoted stronger countermeasures against side-channel attacks. In this paper, we present the first attack on a protected hardware implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber. We demonstrate a practical message (shared key) recovery attack on the first-order masked FPGA implementation of Kyber-512 by Kamucheka et al. (2022) using power analysis based on the Hamming distance leakage model. The presented attack exploits a vulnerability located in the masked message decoding procedure which is called during the decryption step of the decapsulation. The message recovery is performed using a profiled deep learning-based method which extracts the message directly, without extracting each share explicitly. By repeating the same decapsulation process multiple times, it is possible to increase the success rate of full shared key recovery to 99%.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1084

See all topics related to this paper.

Feel free to post resources that are related to this paper below.

Example resources include: implementations, explanation materials, talks, slides, links to previous discussions on other websites.

For more information, see the rules for Resource Topics .