[Resource Topic] 2024/1715: OT-PCA: New Key-Recovery Plaintext-Checking Oracle Based Side-Channel Attacks on HQC with Offline Templates

Welcome to the resource topic for 2024/1715

Title:
OT-PCA: New Key-Recovery Plaintext-Checking Oracle Based Side-Channel Attacks on HQC with Offline Templates

Authors: Haiyue Dong, Qian Guo

Abstract:

In this paper, we introduce OT-PCA, a novel approach for conducting Plaintext-Checking (PC) oracle based side-channel attacks, specifically designed for Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC). By calling the publicly accessible HQC decoder, we build offline templates that enable efficient extraction of soft information for hundreds of secret positions with just a single PC oracle call. Our method addresses critical challenges in optimizing key-related information extraction, including maximizing decryption output entropy and ensuring error pattern independence, through the use of genetic-style algorithms.

Extensive simulations demonstrate that our new attack method significantly reduces the required number of oracle calls, achieving a 2.4-fold decrease for hqc-128 and even greater reductions for hqc-192 and hqc-256 compared to current state-of-the-art methods. Notably, the attack shows strong resilience against inaccuracy in the PC oracle—when the oracle accuracy decreases to 95%, the reduction factor in oracle call requirements increases to 7.6 for hqc-128.

Lastly, a real-world evaluation conducted using power analysis on a platform with an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller validates the practical applicability and effectiveness of our approach.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1715

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