A Side-Channel Assisted Cryptanalytic Attack Against QcBits

Mélissa Rossi 1, 2, 3 Mike Hamburg 4 Michael Hutter 4 Mark Marson 4
1 THALES COMMUNICATIONS & SECURITY
2 PSL - PSL Research University
3 CASCADE - Construction and Analysis of Systems for Confidentiality and Authenticity of Data and Entities
DI-ENS - Département d'informatique de l'École normale supérieure, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique : UMR 8548, Inria de Paris
4 Rambus Cryptography Research Division [San Francisco]
Abstract : QcBits is a code-based public key algorithm based on a problem thought to be resistant to quantum computer attacks. It is a constant-time implementation for a quasi-cyclic moderate density parity check (QC-MDPC) Niederreiter encryption scheme, and has excellent performance and small key sizes. In this paper, we present a key recovery attack against QcBits. We first used differential power analysis (DPA) against the syndrome computation of the decoding algorithm to recover partial information about one half of the private key. We then used the recovered information to set up a system of noisy binary linear equations. Solving this system of equations gave us the entire key. Finally, we propose a simple but effective countermeasure against the power analysis used during the syndrome calculation.
Keywords : Differential power analysis Side-channel analysis QC-MDPC codes Niederreiter McEliece Post-quantum cryptography QcBits Noisy binary linear equations Learning parity with noise
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Mélissa Rossi, Mike Hamburg, Michael Hutter, Mark Marson. A Side-Channel Assisted Cryptanalytic Attack Against QcBits. CHES 2017 - Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, Sep 2017, Taipei, Taiwan. pp.22, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-66787-4_1⟩. ⟨hal-01614569⟩

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