International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

Joel Gärtner

Publications and invited talks

Year
Venue
Title
2025
CRYPTO
Compact Lattice Signatures via Iterative Rejection Sampling
Joel Gärtner
One of the primary approaches for constructing lattice-based signature schemes is through the "Fiat-Shamir with aborts" methodology. Schemes constructed using this approach may abort and restart during signing, corresponding to rejection sampling produced signatures in order to ensure that they follow a distribution that is independent of the secret key. This rejection sampling is only feasible when the output distribution is sufficiently wide, limiting how compact this type of signature schemes can be. In this work, we develop a new method to construct lattice signatures with the ``Fiat-Shamir with aborts'' approach. By constructing signatures in a way that is influenced by the rejection condition, we can significantly lower the rejection probability. This allows our scheme to use an iterative rejection sampling to target narrower output distributions than previous methods, resulting in much more compact signatures. In the most compact variant of our new signature scheme, the combined size of a signature and a verification key is less than half of that for ML-DSA and comparable to that of compact hash-and-sign lattice signature schemes, such as Falcon. Alternatively, by targeting a somewhat wider distribution, the rejection condition of the scheme can be securely ignored. This non-aborting variant of our scheme still retains a notable size advantage over previous lattice-based Fiat-Shamir schemes.
2024
CIC
Unpacking Needs Protection
<p>Most of the previous attacks on Dilithium exploit side-channel information which is leaked during the computation of the polynomial multiplication cs1, where s1 is a small-norm secret and c is a verifier's challenge. In this paper, we present a new attack utilizing leakage during secret key unpacking in the signing algorithm. The unpacking is also used in other post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, including Kyber, because inputs and outputs of their API functions are byte arrays. Exploiting leakage during unpacking is more challenging than exploiting leakage during the computation of cs1 since c varies for each signing, while the unpacked secret key remains constant. Therefore, post-processing is required in the latter case to recover a full secret key. We present two variants of post-processing. In the first one, a half of the coefficients of the secret s1 and the error s2 is recovered by profiled deep learning-assisted power analysis and the rest is derived by solving linear equations based on t = As1 + s2, where A and t are parts of the public key. This case assumes knowledge of the least significant bits of t, t0. The second variant uses lattice reduction to derive s1 without the knowledge of t0. However, it needs a larger portion of s1 to be recovered by power analysis. We evaluate both variants on an ARM Cortex-M4 implementation of Dilithium-2. The experiments show that the attack assuming the knowledge of t0 can recover s1 from a single trace captured from a different from profiling device with a non-negligible probability. </p>
2023
RWC
How We Broke a Fifth-Order Masked Kyber Implementation by Copy-Paste
Elena Dubrova Kalle Ngo Joel Gärtner
CRYSTALS-Kyber has been recently selected by the NIST as a post-quantum public-key encryption and key-establishment algorithm to be standardized. This makes it important to assess how well CRYSTALS-Kyber implementations withstand side-channel attacks. The first-order masked implementations of CRYSTALS-Kyber have been already analyzed. In this talk, we will present a side-channel attack on a higher-order masked implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber. We will show how to recover messages from up to the fifth-order masked implementations of CRYSTALS-Kyber in ARM Cortex-M4 CPU by a deep learning-based power analysis. The talk is expected to be of interest to industry which is currently preparing for a shift to quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms.

Coauthors

Elena Dubrova (2)
Joel Gärtner (3)
Kalle Ngo (2)
Ruize Wang (1)