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...

SQIsign is a well-known post-quantum signature scheme due to its small combined signature and public-key size. However, SQIsign suffers from notably long signing times, and verification times are not short either. To improve this, recent research has explored both one-dimensional and two-dimensional variants of SQIsign, each with distinct characteristics. In particular, SQIsign2D's efficient signing and verification times have made it a focal point of recent research. However, the absence of...

As the industry prepares for the transition to post-quantum secure public key cryptographic algorithms, vulnerability analysis of their implementations is gaining importance. A theoretically secure cryptographic algorithm should also be able to withstand the challenges of physical attacks in real-world environments. MAYO is a candidate in the ongoing first round of the NIST post-quantum standardization process for selecting additional digital signature schemes. This paper demonstrates three...

Masking is a sound countermeasure to protect against differential power analysis. Since the work by Balasch et al. in ASIACRYPT 2012, inner product masking has been explored as an alternative to the well known Boolean masking. In CARDIS 2017, Poussier et al. showed that inner product masking achieves higher-order security versus Boolean masking, for the same shared size, in the bit-probing model. Wang et al. in TCHES 2020 verified the inner product masking's security order amplification in...

Recently, the construction of cryptographic schemes based on hard lattice problems has gained immense popularity. Apart from being quantum resistant, lattice-based cryptography allows a wide range of variations in the underlying hard problem. As cryptographic schemes can work in different environments under different operational constraints such as memory footprint, silicon area, efficiency, power requirement, etc., such variations in the underlying hard problem are very useful for designers...

This short note describes an update to the sca25519 library, an ECC implementation computing the X25519 key-exchange protocol on the Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller. The sca25519 software came with extensive mitigations against various side-channel and fault attacks and was, to our best knowledge, the first to claim affordable protection against multiple classes of attacks that are motivated by distinct real-world application scenarios. This library is protected against various passive and...

HAWK is a lattice-based signature scheme candidate to the fourth call of the NIST's Post-Quantum standardization campaign. Considered as a cousin of Falcon (one of the future NIST post-quantum standards) one can wonder whether HAWK shares the same drawbacks as Falcon in terms of side-channel attacks. Indeed, Falcon signature algorithm and particularly its Gaussian sampler, has shown to be highly vulnerable to power-analysis attacks. Besides, efficiently protecting Falcon's signature...

As a prominent category of side-channel attacks (SCAs), plaintext-checking (PC) oracle-based SCAs offer the advantages of generality and operational simplicity on a targeted device. At TCHES 2023, Rajendran et al. and Tanaka et al. independently proposed the multiple-valued (MV) PC oracle, significantly reducing the required number of queries (a.k.a., traces) in the PC oracle. However, in practice, when dealing with environmental noise or inaccuracies in the waveform classifier, they...

This paper presents KyberSlash1 and KyberSlash2 – two timing vulnerabilities in several implementations (including the official reference code) of the Kyber Post-Quantum Key Encapsulation Mechanism, currently undergoing standardization as ML-KEM. We demonstrate the exploitability of both KyberSlash1 and KyberSlash2 on two popular platforms: the Raspberry Pi 2 (Arm Cortex-A7) and the Arm Cortex-M4 microprocessor. Kyber secret keys are reliably recovered within minutes for KyberSlash2 and a...

In computer arithmetic operations, the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) plays a significant role in the efficient implementation of cyclic and nega-cyclic convolutions with the application of multiplying large integers and large degree polynomials. Multiplying polynomials is a common operation in lattice-based cryptography. Hence, the NTT is a core component of several lattice-based cryptographic algorithms. Two well-known examples are the key encapsulation mechanism Kyber and the...

We study the hardness of the Syndrome Decoding problem, the base of most code-based cryptographic schemes, such as Classic McEliece, in the presence of side-channel information. We use ChipWhisperer equipment to perform a template attack on Classic McEliece running on an ARM Cortex-M4, and accurately classify the Hamming weights of consecutive 32-bit blocks of the secret error vector. With these weights at hand, we optimize Information Set Decoding algorithms. Technically, we show how to...

We present a solution to the open problem of designing a linear-time, unbiased and timing attack-resistant shuffling algorithm for fixed-weight sampling. Although it can be implemented without timing leakages of secret data in any architecture, we illustrate with ARMv7-M and ARMv8-A implementations; for the latter, we take advantage of architectural features such as NEON and conditional instructions, which are representative of features available on architectures targeting similar systems,...

This paper presents SNOW-SCA, the first power side-channel analysis (SCA) attack of a 5G mobile communication security standard candidate, SNOW-V, running on a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. First, we perform a generic known-key correlation (KKC) analysis to identify the leakage points. Next, a correlation power analysis (CPA) attack is performed, which reduces the attack complexity to two key guesses for each key byte. The correct secret key is then uniquely identified utilizing...

CRYSTALS-Dilithium is a post-quantum secure digital signature algorithm currently being standardised by NIST. As a result, devices making use of CRYSTALS-Dilithium will soon become generally available and be deployed in various environments. It is thus important to assess the resistance of CRYSTALS-Dilithum implementations to physical attacks. In this paper, we present an attack on a CRYSTALS-Dilithium implementation in hedged mode in ARM Cortex-M4 using fault injection. Voltage glitching...

Kyber KEM, the NIST selected PQC standard for Public Key Encryption and Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) has been subjected to a variety of side-channel attacks, through the course of the NIST PQC standardization process. However, all these attacks targeting the decapsulation procedure of Kyber KEM either require knowledge of the ciphertexts or require to control the value of ciphertexts for key recovery. However, there are no known attacks in a blind setting, where the attacker does not...

In July 2022, the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the first set of Post-Quantum Cryptography standards: Kyber, Dilithium, Falcon, and SPHINCS . Shortly after, NIST published a call for proposals for additional post-quantum signature schemes to complement their initial portfolio. In 2023, 50 submissions were received, and 40 were accepted as round-1 candidates for future standardization. In this paper, we study the suitability and performance of said...

Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) was proposed due to the potential threats quantum computer attacks against conventional public key cryptosystems, and four PQC algorithms besides CRYSTALS-Dilithium (Dilithium for short) have so far been selected for NIST standardization. However, the selected algorithms are still vulnerable to side-channel attacks in practice, and their physical security need to be further evaluated. This study introduces two efficient power analysis attacks, the optimized...

One category of the digital signatures submitted to the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process for Additional Digital Signature Schemes comprises proposals constructed leveraging the MPC-in-the-Head (MPCitH) paradigm. Typically, this framework is characterized by the computation and storage in sequence of large data structures both in signing and verification algorithms, resulting in heavy memory consumption. While some research on the efficiency of these schemes on...

This paper questions the side-channel security of central reduction technique, which is widely adapted in efficient implementations of Lattice-Based Cryptography (LBC). We show that the central reduction leads to a vulnerability by creating a strong dependency between the power consumption and the sign of sensitive intermediate values. We exploit this dependency by introducing the novel absolute value prediction function, which can be employed in higher-order non-profiled multi-query...

We present a side-channel attack on CRYSTALS-Dilithium, a post-quantum secure digital signature scheme, with two variants of post-processing. The side-channel attack exploits information leakage in the secret key unpacking procedure of the signing algorithm to recover the coefficients of the polynomials in the secret key vectors ${\bf s}_1$ and ${\bf s}_2$ by profiled deep learning-assisted power analysis. In the first variant, one half of the coefficients of ${\bf s}_1$ and ${\bf s}_2$ is...

In 2022, NIST selected Kyber and Dilithium as post-quantum cryptographic standard algorithms. The Number Theoretic Transformation (NTT) algorithm, which facilitates polynomial multiplication, has become a primary target for side-channel attacks. In this work, we embed the NTT transformation matrix in Dilithium and Kyber into the SIS search problem, and further, we propose a divide and conquer strategy for dimensionality reduction of the SIS problem by utilizing the properties of NTT, and...

The idea of balancing the side-channel leakage in software was proposed more than a decade ago. Just like with other hiding-based countermeasures, the goal is not to hide the leakage completely but to significantly increase the effort required for the attack. Previous approaches focused on two directions: either balancing the Hamming weight of the processed data or deriving the code by using stochastic leakage profiling. In this brief, we build upon these results by proposing a novel...

GLS254 is an elliptic curve defined over a finite field of characteristic 2; it contains a 253-bit prime order subgroup, and supports an endomorphism that can be efficiently computed and helps speed up some typical operations such as multiplication of a curve element by a scalar. That curve offers on x86 and ARMv8 platforms the best known performance for elliptic curves at the 128-bit security level. In this paper we present a number of new results related to GLS254: - We describe...

MAYO is a popular high-calorie condiment as well as an auspicious candidate in the ongoing NIST competition for additional post-quantum signature schemes achieving competitive signature and public key sizes. In this work, we present high-speed implementations of MAYO using the AVX2 and Armv7E-M instruction sets targeting recent x86 platforms and the Arm Cortex-M4. Moreover, the main contribution of our work is showing that MAYO can be even faster when switching from a bitsliced...

In this work, we propose a novel single-trace key recovery attack targeting side-channel leakage from the key-generation and encryption procedure of Kyber KEM. Our attack exploits the inherent nature of the Module-Learning With Errors (Module-LWE) problem used in Kyber KEM. We demonstrate that the inherent reliance of Kyber KEM on the Module-LWE problem results in higher number of repeated and secret key-related computations, referred to as STAMPs appearing on a single side channel trace,...

In response to side-channel attacks on masked implementations of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, a new bitsliced higher-order masked implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber has been presented at CHES'2022. The bitsliced implementations are typically more difficult to break by side-channel analysis because they execute a single instruction across multiple bits in parallel. However, in this paper, we reveal new vulnerabilities in the masked Boolean to arithmetic conversion procedure of this...

Due to recent cryptanalytical breakthroughs, the multivariate signature schemes that seemed to be most promising in the past years are no longer in the focus of the research community. Hence, the cryptographically mature UOV scheme is of great interest again. Since it has not been part of the NIST process for standardizing post-quantum cryptography so far, it has not been studied intensively for its physical security. In this work, we present a side-channel attack on the latest...

Falcon is one of the three post-quantum signature schemes selected for standardization by NIST. Due to its low bandwidth and high efficiency, Falcon is seen as an attractive option for quantum-safe embedded systems. In this work, we study Falcon's side-channel resistance by analysing its Gaussian samplers. Our results are mainly twofold. The first result is an improved key recovery exploiting the leakage within the base sampler investigated by Guerreau et al. (CHES 2022). Instead of...

In this work we present a lightweight lattice-based identification protocol based on the CPA-secured public key encryption scheme Kyber. It is designed as a replacement for existing classical ECC- or RSA-based identification protocols in IoT, smart card applications, or for device authentication. The proposed protocol is simple, efficient, and implementations are supposed to be easy to harden against side-channel attacks. Compared to standard constructions for identification protocols based...

The elliptic curve family of schemes has the lowest computational latency, memory use, energy consumption, and bandwidth requirements, making it the most preferred public key method for adoption into network protocols. Being suitable for embedded devices and applicable for key exchange and authentication, ECC is assuming a prominent position in the field of IoT cryptography. The attractive properties of the relatively new curve Curve448 contribute to its inclusion in the TLS1.3 protocol and...

Two multivariate digital signature schemes, Rainbow and GeMSS, made it into the third round of the NIST PQC competition. However, either made its way to being a standard due to devastating attacks (in one case by Beullens, the other by Tao, Petzoldt, and Ding). How should multivariate cryptography recover from this blow? We propose that, rather than trying to fix Rainbow and HFEv- by introducing countermeasures, the better approach is to return to the classical Oil and Vinegar scheme. We...

This paper presents a new profiling side-channel attack on CRYSTALS-Dilithium, the new NIST primary standard for quantum-safe digital signatures. An open source implementation of CRYSTALS-Dilithium is already available, with constant-time property as a consideration for side-channel resilience. However, this implementation does not protect against attacks that exploit intermediate data leakage. We show how to exploit a new leakage on a vector generated during the signing process, for which...

CRYSTALS-Kyber has been selected by the NIST as a public-key encryption and key encapsulation mechanism to be standardized. It is also included in the NSA's suite of cryptographic algorithms recommended for national security systems. This makes it important to evaluate the resistance of CRYSTALS-Kyber's implementations to side-channel attacks. The unprotected and first-order masked software implementations have been already analysed. In this paper, we present deep learning-based message...

This paper provides necessary properties to algorithmically secure first-order maskings in scalar micro-architectures. The security notions of threshold implementations are adapted following micro-processor leakage effects which are known to the literature. The resulting notions, which are based on the placement of shares, are applied to a two-share randomness-free PRESENT cipher and Keccak-f. The assembly implementations are put on a RISC-V and an ARM Cortex-M4 core. All designs are...

The lattice-based CRYSTALS-Dilithium signature scheme has been selected for standardization by the NIST. As part of the selection process, a large number of implementations for platforms like x86, ARM Cortex-M4, or – on the hardware side – Xilinx Artix-7 have been presented and discussed by experts. While software implementations have been subject to side-channel analysis with several attacks being published, an analysis of Dilithium hardware implementations and their peculiarities has not...

Masking of S-boxes using lookup tables is an effective countermeasure to thwart side-channel attacks on block ciphers implemented in software. At first and second orders, the Table-based Masking (TBM) schemes can be very efficient and even faster than circuit-based masking schemes. Ever since the customised second-order TBM schemes were proposed, the focus has been on designing and optimising Higher-Order Table-based Masking (HO-TBM) schemes that facilitate masking at arbitrary order. One of...

Recent advances in quantum computing are increasingly jeopardizing the security of cryptosystems currently in widespread use, such as RSA or elliptic-curve signatures. To address this threat, researchers and standardization institutes have accelerated the transition to quantum-resistant cryptosystems, collectively known as Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). These PQC schemes present new challenges due to their larger memory and computational footprints and their higher chance of latent...

In this work, we propose generic and novel adaptations to the binary Plaintext-Checking (PC) oracle based side-channel attacks for Kyber KEM. Binary PC oracle-based side-channel attacks are fairly generic and easy to mount on a given target, as the attacker requires very minimal information about the target device. However, these attacks have an inherent disadvantage of requiring a few thousand traces to perform full key recovery, as they only recover a single bit of information per trace....

Creating a good deep learning (DL) model is an art which requires expertise in DL and a large set of labeled data for training neural networks. Neither is readily available. In this paper, we introduce a method which enables us to achieve good results with bad DL models. We use simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks, trained on a small dataset, which make strongly biased predictions if used without the proposed method. The core idea is to extend the attack dataset so that at least one...

In this work, we present the first fault injection analysis of the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT). The NTT is an integral computation unit, widely used for polynomial multiplication in several structured lattice-based key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) and digital signature schemes. We identify a critical single fault vulnerability in the NTT, which severely reduces the entropy of its output. This in turn enables us to perform a wide-range of attacks applicable to lattice-based KEMs as...

In the ongoing last round of NIST’s post-quantum cryptography standardization competition, side-channel analysis of finalists is a main focus of attention. While their resistance to timing, power and near field electromagnetic (EM) side-channels has been thoroughly investigated, amplitude-modulated EM emanations has not been considered so far. The attacks based on amplitude-modulated EM emanations are more stealthy because they exploit side-channels intertwined into the signal transmitted by...

In this work, we present a systematic study of Side-Channel Attacks (SCA) and Fault Injection Attacks (FIA) on structured lattice-based schemes, with a focus on Kyber Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) and Dilithium signature scheme, which are leading candidates in the NIST standardization process for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). Through our study, we attempt to understand the underlying similarities and differences between the existing attacks, while classifying them into different...

The code-based post-quantum algorithm Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) is a fourth round candidate in the NIST standardization project. Since their third round version the authors utilize a new combination of error correcting codes, namely a combination of a Reed-Muller and a Reed-Solomon code, which requires an adaption of published attacks. We identify that the power side-channel attack by Uneo et al. from CHES 2021 does not work in practice as they miss the fact that the implemented Reed-Muller...

In this paper, we propose the first key-recovery side-channel attack on Classic McEliece, a KEM finalist in the NIST Post-quantum Cryptography Standardization Project. Our novel idea is to design an attack algorithm where we submit special ciphertexts to the decryption oracle that correspond to cases of single errors. Decoding of such cipher-texts involves only a single entry in a large secret permutation, which is part of the secret key. Through an identified leakage in the additive...

This paper proposes a new single-trace side-channel attack on lattice-based post-quantum protocols. We target the ω-small polynomial sampling of NTRU, NTRU Prime, and CRYSTALS-DILITHIUM algorithm implementations (which are NIST Round-3 finalists and alternative candidates), and we demonstrate the vulnerabilities of their sub-routines to a power-based side-channel attack. Specifically, we reveal that the sorting implementation in NTRU/NTRU Prime and the shuffling in CRYSTALS-DILITHIUM's...

In this paper, we present an efficient side-channel key recovery attack against Dumbo, the 160-bit variant of NIST lightweight cryptography contest candidate Elephant. We use Correlation Power Analysis to attack the first round of the Spongent permutation during the absorption of the first block of associated data. The full attack runs in about a minute on a common laptop and only requires around 30 power traces to recover the entire secret key on an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller clocked at...

Side-channel attacks are formidable threats to the cryptosystems deployed in the real world. An effective and provably secure countermeasure against side-channel attacks is masking. In this work, we present a detailed study of higher-order masking techniques for the key-encapsulation mechanism Saber. Saber is one of the lattice-based finalist candidates in the National Institute of Standards of Technology's post-quantum standardization procedure. We provide a detailed analysis of different...

In this paper, the recommended implementation of the post-quantum key exchange SIKE for Cortex-M4 is attacked through power analysis with a single trace by clustering with the $k$-means algorithm the power samples of all the invocations of the elliptic curve point swapping function in the constant-time coordinate-randomized three point ladder. Because each sample depends on whether two consecutive bits of the private key are the same or not, a successful clustering (with $k=2$) leads to the...

The Number Theoretic Transform (NTT), Toom-Cook, and Karatsuba are the most commonly used algorithms for implementing lattice-based ?nalists of the NIST PQC competition. In this paper, we propose Toeplitz matrix-vector product (TMVP) based algorithms for multiplication for all parameter sets of NTRU. We implement the pro- posed algorithms on ARM Cortex-M4. The results show that TMVP- based multiplication algorithms using the four-way TMVP formula are more e?cient for NTRU. Our algorithms...

This paper presents faster implementations of the lattice-based schemes Dilithium and Kyber on the Cortex-M4. Dilithium is one of the three signature finalists in the NIST post-quantum project (NIST PQC), while Kyber is one of the four key-encapsulation mechanism (KEM) finalists. Our optimizations affect the core polynomial arithmetic using the number-theoretic transform (NTT) of both schemes. Our main contributions are threefold: We present a faster signed Barrett reduction for Kyber,...

Masked comparison is one of the most expensive operations in side-channel secure implementations of lattice-based post-quantum cryptography, especially for higher masking orders. First, we introduce two new masked comparison algorithms, which improve the arithmetic comparison of D'Anvers et al. and the hybrid comparison method of Coron et al. respectively. We then look into implementation-specific optimizations, and show that small specific adaptations can have a significant impact on the...

In this work, we present a fast and first-order secure Kyber implementation optimized for ARM Cortex-M4. Most notably, to our knowledge this is the first liberally-licensed open-source Cortex-M4 implementation of masked Kyber. The ongoing NIST standardization process for post-quantum cryptography and newly proposed side-channel attacks have increased the demand for side-channel analysis and countermeasures for the finalists. On the foundation of the commonly used PQM4 project, we make...

Falcon is a very efficient and compact lattice-based signature finalist of the NIST's Post-Quantum standardization campaign. This work assesses Falcon's side-channel resistance by analyzing two vulnerabilities, namely the pre-image computation and the trapdoor sampling. The first attack is an improvement of Karabulut and Aysu (DAC 2021). It overcomes several difficulties inherent to the structure of the stored key like the Fourier representation and directly recovers the key with a limited...

At Indocrypt 2021, Hermelink, Pessl, and Pöppelmann presented a fault attack against Kyber in which a system of linear inequalities over the private key is generated and solved. The attack requires a laser and is, understandably, demonstrated with simulations—not actual equipment. We facilitate and diversify the attack in four ways, thereby admitting cheaper and more forgiving fault-injection setups. Firstly, the attack surface is enlarged: originally, the two input operands of the...

Transport Layer Security (TLS) constitutes one of the most widely used protocols for securing Internet communications and has also found broad acceptance in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. As we progress toward a security environment resistant to quantum computer attacks, TLS needs to be transformed to support post-quantum cryptography. However, post-quantum TLS is still not standardised, and its overall performance, especially in resource-constrained, IoT-capable, embedded devices, is...

In 2016, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initiated a standardization process among the post-quantum secure algorithms. Forming part of the alternate group of candidates after Round 2 of the process is the Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) mechanism which attracts with the smallest key sizes offering post-quantum security in scenarios of limited bandwidth and memory resources. Even further reduction of the exchanged information is offered by the...

This work presents the first full implementation of Wave, a postquantum code-based signature scheme. We define Wavelet, a concrete Wave scheme at the 128-bit classical security level (or NIST postquantum security Level 1) equipped with a fast verification algorithm targeting embedded devices. Wavelet offers 930-byte signatures, with a public key of 3161 kB. We include implementation details using AVX instructions, and on ARM Cortex-M4, including a solution to deal with Wavelet’s large public...

Checking the equality of two arrays is a crucial building block of the Fujisaki-Okamoto transformation, and as such it is used in several post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms including Kyber and Saber. While this comparison operation is easy to perform in a black box setting, it is hard to efficiently protect against side-channel attacks. For instance, the hash-based method by Oder et al. is limited to first-order masking, a higher-order method by Bache et al. was shown to be flawed,...

We focus on the multiple persistent faults analysis in this paper to fill existing gaps in its application in a variety of scenarios. Our major contributions are twofold. First, we propose a novel technique to apply persistent fault in the multiple persistent faults setting that decreases the number of survived keys and the required data. We demonstrate that by utilizing 1509 and 1448 ciphertexts, the number of survived keys after performing persistent fault analysis on AES in the presence...

Public key cryptography is widely used in key exchange and digital signature protocols. Public key cryptography requires expensive primitive operations, such as finite-field and group operations. These finite-field and group operations require a number of clock cycles to exe- cute. By carefully optimizing these primitive operations, public key cryp- tography can be performed with reasonably fast execution timing. In this paper, we present the new implementation result of Curve448 on 32-bit ARM...

A variety of post-quantum cryptographic schemes are currently undergoing standardization in the National Institute of Standards and Technology's post-quantum cryptography standardization process. It is well known from classical cryptography that actual implementations of cryptographic schemes can be attacked by exploiting side-channels, e.g. timing behavior, power consumption or emanation in the electromagnetic field. Although several of the reference implementations currently in the third...

We present an implementation of the hash-based post-quantum signature scheme SPHINCS that enables heavily memory-restricted devices to sign messages by streaming-out a signature during its computation and to verify messages by streaming-in a signature. We demonstrate our implementation in the context of Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) by proposing a SPHINCS integration and a streaming extension for the TPM specification. We evaluate the overhead of our signature-streaming approach for a...

This paper describes an ECC implementation computing the X25519 keyexchange protocol on the Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller. For providing protections against various side-channel and fault attacks we first review known attacks and countermeasures, then we provide software implementations that come with extensive mitigations, and finally we present a preliminary side-channel evaluation. To our best knowledge, this is the first public software claiming affordable protection against multiple...

High-degree, low-precision polynomial arithmetic is a fundamental computational primitive underlying structured lattice based cryptography. Its algorithmic properties and suitability for implementation on different compute platforms is an active area of research, and this article contributes to this line of work: Firstly, we present memory-efficiency and performance improvements for the Toom-Cook/Karatsuba polynomial multiplication strategy. Secondly, we provide implementations of those...

Masking using randomised lookup tables is a popular countermeasure for side-channel attacks, particularly at small masking orders. An advantage of this class of countermeasures for masking S-boxes compared to ISW-based masking is that it supports pre-processing and thus significantly reducing the amount of computation to be done after the unmasked inputs are available. Indeed, the online computation can be as fast as just a table lookup. But the size of the randomised lookup table increases...

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has designated ARM microcontrollers as an important benchmarking platform for its Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization process (NISTPQC). In view of this, we explore the design space of the NISTPQC finalist Saber on the Cortex-M4 and its close relation, the Cortex-M3. In the process, we investigate various optimization strategies and memory-time tradeoffs for number-theoretic transforms (NTTs). Recent work by [Chung et al.,...

This study proposes a chosen-ciphertext side-channel attack against a lattice-based key encapsulation mechanism (KEM), the third-round candidate of the national institute of standards and technology (NIST) standardization project. Unlike existing attacks that target operations such as inverse NTT and message encoding/decoding, we target Barrett Reduction in the decapsulation phase of CRYSTALS-KYBER to obtain a secret key. We show that a sensitive variable-dependent leakage of Barrett...

This paper describes the first practical single-trace side-channel power analysis of SIKE. While SIKE is a post-quantum key exchange, the scheme still relies on a secret elliptic curve scalar multiplication which involves a loop of a double-and-add procedure, of which each iteration depends on a single bit of the private key. The attack therefore exploits the nature of elliptic curve point addition formulas which require the same function to be executed multiple times. We show how a single...

Abstract—This paper proposes the first side-channel attack on FALCON—a NIST Round-3 finalist for the post-quantum digital signature standard. We demonstrate a known-plaintext attack that uses the electromagnetic measurements of the device to extract the secret signing keys, which then can be used to forge signatures on arbitrary messages. The proposed attack targets the unique floating-point multiplications within FALCON’s Fast Fourier Transform through a novel extend-and-prune strategy that...

We study masking countermeasures for side-channel attacks against signature schemes constructed from the MPC-in-the-head paradigm, specifically when the MPC protocol uses preprocessing. This class of signature schemes includes Picnic, an alternate candidate in the third round of the NIST post-quantum standardization project. The only previously known approach to masking MPC-in-the-head signatures suffers from interoperability issues and increased signature sizes. Further, we present a new...

In this work, we propose generic and novel side-channel assisted chosen-ciphertext attacks on NTRU-based key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs). These KEMs are IND-CCA secure, that is, they are secure in the chosen-ciphertext model. Our attacks involve the construction of malformed ciphertexts. When decapsulated by the target device, these ciphertexts ensure that a targeted intermediate variable becomes very closely related to the secret key. An attacker, who can obtain information about the...

Statistical Ineffective Fault Attacks (SIFA) have been recently proposed as very powerful key-recovery strategies on symmetric cryptographic primitives' implementations. Specically, they have been shown to bypass many common countermeasures against faults such as redundancy or infection, and to remain applicable even when side-channel countermeasures are deployed. In this work, we investigate combined side-channel and fault attacks and show that a profiled, SIFA-like attack can be applied...

BIKE is a key encapsulation mechanism that entered the third round of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process. This paper presents two constant-time implementations for BIKE, one tailored for the Intel Haswell and one tailored for the ARM Cortex-M4. Our Haswell implementation is much faster than the avx2 implementation written by the BIKE team: for bikel1, the level-1 parameter set, we achieve a 1.39x speedup for decapsulation (which is the slowest operation) and a 1.33x...

This paper presents a constant-time implementation of Classic McEliece for ARM Cortex-M4. Specifically, our target platform is stm32f4-Discovery, a development board on which the amount of SRAM is not even large enough to hold the public key of the smallest parameter sets of Classic McEliece. Fortunately, the flash memory is large enough, so we use it to store the public key. For the level-1 parameter sets mceliece348864 and mceliece348864f, our implementation takes 582 199 cycles for...

CRYSTALS-Dilithium as a lattice-based digital signature scheme has been selected as a finalist in the PQC standardization process of NIST. As part of this selection, a variety of software implementations have been evaluated regarding their performance and memory requirements for platforms like x86 or ARM Cortex-M4. In this work, we present a first set of FPGA implementations for the low-end Xilinx Artix-7 platform, evaluating the peculiarities of the scheme in hardware, reflecting all...

The Classic McEliece cryptosystem is one of the most trusted quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes. Deploying it in practical applications, however, is challenging due to the size of its public key. In this work, we bridge this gap. We present an implementation of Classic McEliece on an ARM Cortex-M4 processor, optimized to overcome memory constraints. To this end, we present an algorithm to retrieve the public key ad-hoc. This reduces memory and storage requirements and enables the...

Abstract The Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation mechanism (SIKE) is the only post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism based on supersingular elliptic curves and isogenies between them. Despite the security of the protocol, unlike the rest of the NIST post-quantum algorithms, SIKE requires more number of clock cycles and hence does not provide competitive timing, energy and power consumption results. However, it is more attractive offering smallest public key sizes as well as ciphertext...

The progress on constructing quantum computers and the ongoing standardization of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) have led to the development and refinement of promising new digital signature schemes and key encapsulation mechanisms (KEM). Especially lattice-based schemes have gained some popularity in the research community, presumably due to acceptable key, ciphertext, and signature sizes as well as good performance results and cryptographic strength. However, in some practical...

Masking is a popular technique to protect cryptographic implementations against side-channel attacks and comes in several variants including Boolean and arithmetic masking. Some masked implementations require conversion between these two variants, which is increasingly the case for masking of post-quantum encryption and signature schemes. One way to perform Arithmetic to Boolean (A2B) mask conversion is a table-based approach first introduced by Coron and Tchulkine, and later corrected and...

With the NIST Post quantum cryptography competition in final round, the importance of implementation security is highlighted in the latest call. In this regard, we report practical side-channel assisted message recovery attacks over embedded implementations of several post-quantum public key encryption (PKE) and key encapsulation mechanisms (KEM) based on the Learning With Errors (LWE) and Learning With Rounding (LWR) problem, which include three finalists and three semi-finalist candidates...

Lattice-based NIST PQC finalists need efficient multiplication in $\mathbb{Z}_q[x]/(f(x))$. Multiplication in this ring can be performed very efficiently via number theoretic transform (NTT) as done in CRYSTALS-Kyber if the parameters of the scheme allow it. If NTT is not supported, other multiplication algorithms must be employed. For example, if the modulus $q$ of the scheme is a power of two, as in Saber and NTRU, then NTT can not be used directly. In this case, Karatsuba and Toom-Cook...

We present implementations of the lattice-based digital signature scheme Dilithium for ARM Cortex-M3 and ARM Cortex-M4. Dilithium is one of the three signature finalists of the NIST post-quantum cryptography competition. As our Cortex-M4 target, we use the popular STM32F407-DISCOVERY development board. Compared to the previous speed records on the Cortex-M4 by Ravi, Gupta, Chattopadhyay, and Bhasin we speed up the key operations $\text{NTT}$ and $\text{NTT}^{-1}$ by 20% which together with...

This paper proposes two different methods to perform NTT-based polynomial multiplication in polynomial rings that do not naturally support such a multiplication. We demonstrate these methods on the NTRU Prime key-encapsulation mechanism (KEM) proposed by Bernstein, Chuengsatiansup, Lange, and Vredendaal, which uses a polynomial ring that is, by design, not amenable to use with NTT. One of our approaches is using Good's trick and focuses on speed and supporting more than one parameter set...

We suggest a small change to the Dilithium signature scheme, that allows one to reuse computations between rejected nonces, for a speed-up in signing time. The modification is based on the idea that, after rejecting on a too large $\|\mathbf{r}_0\|_\infty$, not all elements of the nonce $\mathbf{y}$ are spent. We swap the order of the checks; and if this $\mathbf{r}_0$-check fails, we only need to resample $y_1$. We provide a proof that shows that the modification does not affect the...

The fixslicing implementation strategy was originally introduced as a new representation for the hardware-oriented GIFT block cipher to achieve very efficient software constant-time implementations. In this article, we show that the fundamental idea underlying the fixslicing technique is not of interest only for GIFT, but can be applied to other ciphers as well. Especially, we study the benefits of fixslicing in the case of AES and show that it allows to reduce by 52% the amount of...

The Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) is a critical sub-block used in several structured lattice-based schemes, including Kyber and Dilithium, which are finalist candidates in the NIST's standardization process for post-quantum cryptography. The NTT was shown to be susceptible to single trace side-channel attacks by Primas et al. in CHES 2017 and Pessl et al. in Latincrypt 2019 who demonstrated full key recovery from single traces on the ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. However, the cost of...

The Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) proposal is a promising candidate in the second round of the NIST Post-Quantum cryptography Standardization project. It features small public key sizes, precise estimation of its decryption failure rates and contrary to most of the code-based systems, its security does not rely on hiding the structure of an error-correcting code. In this paper, we propose the first power side-channel attack on the Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) version of HQC. Our attack...

This work presents new speed records for XMSS (RFC 8391) signature verification on embedded devices. For this we make use of a probabilistic method recently proposed by Perin, Zambonin, Martins, Custodio, and Martina (PZMCM) at ISCC 2018, that changes the XMSS signing algorithm to search for fast verifiable signatures. We improve the method, ensuring that the added signing cost for the search is independent of the message length. We provide a statistical analysis of the...

The candidates for the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization have undergone extensive studies on efficiency and theoretical security, but research on their side-channel security is largely lacking. This remains a considerable obstacle for their real-world deployment, where side-channel security can be a critical requirement. This work describes a side-channel resistant instance of Saber, one of the lattice-based candidates, using masking as a countermeasure. Saber proves to be very...

We report an important implementation vulnerability exploitable through physical attacks for message recovery in five lattice-based public-key encryption schemes (PKE) and Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEM) - NewHope, Kyber, Saber, Round5 and LAC that are currently competing in the second round of NIST's standardization process for post-quantum cryptography. The reported vulnerability exists in the message decoding function which is a fundamental kernel present in lattice-based PKE/KEMs and...

Stateful hash-based signature schemes are among the most efficient approaches for post-quantum signature schemes. Although not suitable for general use, they may be suitable for some use cases on constrained devices. LMS and XMSS are hash-based signature schemes that are conjectured to be quantum secure. In this work, we compared multiple instantiations of both schemes on an ARM Cortex-M4. More precisely, we compared performance, stack consumption, and other figures for key generation,...

We present the first practical software implementation of Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) round 2, targeting NIST's 1, 2, 3, and 5 security levels on 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontrollers. The proposed library introduces a new speed record of all SIKE Round 2 protocols with reasonable memory consumption on the low-end target platforms. We achieved this record by adopting several state-of-the-art engineering techniques as well as highly-optimized hand-crafted assembly...

This paper proposes various optimizations for lattice-based key-encapsulation mechanisms (KEM) using the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) on the popular ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. Improvements come in the form of a faster code using more efficient modular reductions, small polynomial multiplications and more aggressive layer merging in the NTT but also reduced stack usage. We test those optimizations in software implementations of Kyber and NewHope, both round 2 candidates in the NIST...

This paper presents optimized software for constant-time variable-base scalar multiplication on prime-order Weierstraß curves using the complete addition and doubling formulas presented by Renes, Costello, and Batina in 2016. Our software targets three different microarchitectures: Intel Sandy Bridge, Intel Haswell, and ARM Cortex-M4. We use a 255-bit elliptic curve over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{255}-19}$ that was proposed by Barreto in 2017. The reason for choosing this curve in our software is that...

In this work, we demonstrate generic and practical side-channel assisted chosen ciphertext attacks on multiple LWE/LWR-based Public Key Encryption (PKE) and Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) secure in the chosen ciphertext model (IND-CCA security). Firstly, we identified EM-based side-channel vulnerabilities in the error correcting codes (ECC) used in LWE/LWR-based schemes that enable to distinguish the value/validity of the codewords output from the decryption operation. We also identified...

A new implementation of Falcon is presented. It solves longstanding issues in the existing reference code: the new implementation is constant-time, it does not require floating-point hardware (though it can use such hardware for better performance), it uses less RAM, and achieves much better performance on both large systems (x86 with Skylake cores, POWER8,...) and small microcontrollers (ARM Cortex M4). In particular, signature generation with Falcon-512 takes less than 470k cycles on a...

This paper presents pqm4 – a testing and benchmarking framework for the ARM Cortex-M4. It makes use of a widely available discovery board with 196 KiB of memory and 1 MiB flash ROM. It currently includes 10 key encapsulation mechanisms and 5 signature schemes of the NIST PQC competition. For the remaining 11 schemes, the available implementations do require more than the available memory or they depend on external libraries which makes them arguably unsuitable for embedded devices.

Single-trace side-channel attacks are a considerable threat to implementations of classic public-key schemes. For lattice-based cryptography, however, this class of attacks is much less understood, and only a small number of previous works show attacks. Primas et al., for instance, present a single-trace attack on the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT), which is at the heart of many efficient lattice-based schemes. They, however, attack a variable-time implementation and also require a rather...

In this paper, we analyze the implementation level fault vulnerabilities of deterministic lattice-based signature schemes. In particular, we extend the practicality of skip-addition fault attacks through exploitation of determinism in certain variants of Dilithium (Deterministic variant) and qTESLA signature scheme (originally submitted deterministic version), which are two leading candidates for the NIST standardization of post-quantum cryptography. We show that single targeted faults...

Most NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) candidate algorithms use symmetric primitives internally for various purposes such as ``seed expansion'' and CPA to CCA transforms. Such auxiliary symmetric operations constituted only a fraction of total execution time of traditional RSA and ECC algorithms, but with faster lattice algorithms the impact of symmetric algorithm characteristics can be very significant. A choice to use a specific PQC algorithm implies that its internal symmetric...