Welcome to the resource topic for 2023/1626
Title:
Et tu, Brute? SCA Assisted CCA using Valid Ciphertexts - A Case Study on HQC KEM
Authors: Thales Paiva, Prasanna Ravi, Dirmanto Jap, Shivam Bhasin
Abstract:HQC is a code-based key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) that was selected to move to the fourth round of the NIST post-quantum standardization process. While this scheme was previously targeted by side-channel assisted chosen-ciphertext attacks for key recovery, we notice that all of these attacks use malformed ciphertexts, which can be easily detected since they cause a decapsulation failure. In this case, designers may chose as a countermeasure to refresh the key whenever a failure occurs, making these previous attacks ineffective. In this work, we present the first side-channel assisted chosen-ciphertext attacks using valid ciphertexts which can be carried out in a stealthy manner for key recovery. Our attacks target side-channel leakage from two different operations within the Reed-Muller decoder used for decryption, and can recover the secret key with 100% success rate, even in the presence of errors in side-channel information. All our experiments are performed on the open-source implementation of HQC KEM taken from the pqm4 library, with our attacks validated using both the power and EM side-channel. We also demonstrate novel key recovery attacks which also work on shuffled implementations, and discuss applicability of our attack to masking countermeasures. To the best of our knowledge, we are not aware of a side-channel protected design for HQC KEM, and thus we believe our work stresses the need towards more research on secure and efficient masking and hiding countermeasures for HQC KEM.
ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1626
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 .