Drop by Drop you break the rock - Exploiting generic vulnerabilities in Lattice-based PKE/KEMs using EM-based Physical Attacks

Prasanna Ravi; Shivam Bhasin; Sujoy Sinha Roy; Anupam Chattopadhyay

Paper 2020/549

Drop by Drop you break the rock - Exploiting generic vulnerabilities in Lattice-based PKE/KEMs using EM-based Physical Attacks

Prasanna Ravi, Shivam Bhasin, Sujoy Sinha Roy, and Anupam Chattopadhyay

Abstract

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 further analysis of the implementations in the public pqm4 library revealed that the message decoding function is implemented in a similar manner in all the identified schemes and thus they all share the common side-channel vulnerability that leaks individual bits of the secret message. We demonstrate that the identified vulnerability can be exploited through a number of practical electromagnetic side-channel attacks, fault attacks and combined attacks on implementations from the pqm4 library running on the ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. As a key contribution, we also demonstrate the first practical EM-based combined side-channel and fault attack on lattice-based PKE/KEMs.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: post-quantum cryptography lattice-based cryptography EM- based side-channel attacks EM-based fault injection attacks
Contact author(s): PRASANNA RAVI @ ntu edu sg
History: 2020-05-15: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2020/549
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/549,
      author = {Prasanna Ravi and Shivam Bhasin and Sujoy Sinha Roy and Anupam Chattopadhyay},
      title = {Drop by Drop you break the rock - Exploiting generic vulnerabilities in Lattice-based PKE/KEMs using EM-based Physical Attacks},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2020/549},
      year = {2020},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/549}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/549}
}