International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

Peter Pessl

Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2023
TCHES
Belief Propagation Meets Lattice Reduction: Security Estimates for Error-Tolerant Key Recovery from Decryption Errors
In LWE-based KEMs, observed decryption errors leak information about the secret key in the form of equations or inequalities. Several practical fault attacks have already exploited such leakage by either directly applying a fault or enabling a chosen-ciphertext attack using a fault. When the leaked information is in the form of inequalities, the recovery of the secret key is not trivial. Recent methods use either statistical or algebraic methods (but not both), with some being able to handle incorrect information. Having in mind that integration of the side-channel information is a crucial part of several classes of implementation attacks on LWEbased schemes, it is an important question whether statistically processed information can be successfully integrated in lattice reduction algorithms.We answer this question positively by proposing an error-tolerant combination of statistical and algebraic methods that make use of the advantages of both approaches. The combination enables us to improve upon existing methods – we use both fewer inequalities and are more resistant to errors. We further provide precise security estimates based on the number of available inequalities.Our recovery method applies to several types of implementation attacks in which decryption errors are used in a chosen-ciphertext attack. We practically demonstrate the improved performance of our approach in a key-recovery attack against Kyber with fault-induced decryption errors.
2022
TCHES
Higher-Order Masked Ciphertext Comparison for Lattice-Based Cryptography
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, and a very recent higher-order technique by Bos et al. suffers in runtime. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the hash-based approach, and likely many similar first-order techniques, succumb to a relatively simple side-channel collision attack. We can successfully recover a Kyber512 key using just 6000 traces. While this does not break the security claims, it does show the need for efficient higher-order methods. We then present a new higher-order masked comparison algorithm based on the (insecure) higher-order method of Bache et al. Our new method is 4.2x, resp. 7.5x, faster than the method of Bos et al. for a 2nd, resp. 3rd, -order masking on the ARM Cortex-M4, and unlike the method of Bache et al., the new technique takes ciphertext compression into account. We prove correctness, security, and masking security in detail and provide performance numbers for 2nd and 3rd-order implementations. Finally, we verify our the side-channel security of our implementation using the test vector leakage assessment (TVLA) methodology.
2021
TCHES
Fault Attacks on CCA-secure Lattice KEMs 📺
Peter Pessl Lukas Prokop
NIST’s post-quantum standardization effort very recently entered its final round. This makes studying the implementation-security aspect of the remaining candidates an increasingly important task, as such analyses can aid in the final selection process and enable appropriately secure wider deployment after standardization. However, lattice-based key-encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs), which are prominently represented among the finalists, have thus far received little attention when it comes to fault attacks.Interestingly, many of these KEMs exhibit structural similarities. They can be seen as variants of the encryption scheme of Lyubashevsky, Peikert, and Rosen, and employ the Fujisaki-Okamoto transform (FO) to achieve CCA2 security. The latter involves re-encrypting a decrypted plaintext and testing the ciphertexts for equivalence. This corresponds to the classic countermeasure of computing the inverse operation and hence prevents many fault attacks.In this work, we show that despite this inherent protection, practical fault attacks are still possible. We present an attack that requires a single instruction-skipping fault in the decoding process, which is run as part of the decapsulation. After observing if this fault actually changed the outcome (effective fault) or if the correct result is still returned (ineffective fault), we can set up a linear inequality involving the key coefficients. After gathering enough of these inequalities by faulting many decapsulations, we can solve for the key using a bespoke statistical solving approach. As our attack only requires distinguishing effective from ineffective faults, various detection-based countermeasures, including many forms of double execution, can be bypassed.We apply this attack to Kyber and NewHope, both of which belong to the aforementioned class of schemes. Using fault simulations, we show that, e.g., 6,500 faulty decapsulations are required for full key recovery on Kyber512. To demonstrate practicality, we use clock glitches to attack Kyber running on a Cortex M4. As we argue that other schemes of this class, such as Saber, might also be susceptible, the presented attack clearly shows that one cannot rely on the FO transform’s fault deterrence and that proper countermeasures are still needed.
2020
TCHES
Single-Trace Attacks on Keccak 📺
Since its selection as the winner of the SHA-3 competition, Keccak, with all its variants, has found a large number of applications. It is, for instance, a common building block in schemes submitted to NIST’s post-quantum cryptography project. In many of these applications, Keccak processes ephemeral secrets. In such a setting, side-channel adversaries are limited to a single observation, meaning that differential attacks are inherently prevented. If, however, such a single trace of Keccak can already be sufficient for key recovery has so far been unknown. In this paper, we change the above by presenting the first single-trace attack targeting Keccak. Our method is based on soft-analytical side-channel attacks and, thus, combines template matching with message passing in a graphical model of the attacked algorithm. As a straight-forward model of Keccak does not yield satisfactory results, we describe several optimizations for the modeling and the message-passing algorithm. Their combination allows attaining high attack performance in terms of both success rate as well as computational runtime. We evaluate our attack assuming generic software (microcontroller) targets and thus use simulations in the generic noisy Hamming-weight leakage model. Hence, we assume relatively modest profiling capabilities of the adversary. Nonetheless, the attack can reliably recover secrets in a large number of evaluated scenarios at realistic noise levels. Consequently, we demonstrate the need for countermeasures even in settings where DPA is not a threat.
2018
TCHES
Differential Fault Attacks on Deterministic Lattice Signatures
In this paper, we extend the applicability of differential fault attacks to lattice-based cryptography. We show how two deterministic lattice-based signature schemes, Dilithium and qTESLA, are vulnerable to such attacks. In particular, we demonstrate that single random faults can result in a nonce-reuse scenario which allows key recovery. We also expand this to fault-induced partial nonce-reuse attacks, which do not corrupt the validity of the computed signatures and thus are harder to detect.Using linear algebra and lattice-basis reduction techniques, an attacker can extract one of the secret key elements after a successful fault injection. Some other parts of the key cannot be recovered, but we show that a tweaked signature algorithm can still successfully sign any message. We provide experimental verification of our attacks by performing clock glitching on an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. In particular, we show that up to 65.2% of the execution time of Dilithium is vulnerable to an unprofiled attack, where a random fault is injected anywhere during the signing procedure and still leads to a successful key-recovery.
2017
CHES
Single-Trace Side-Channel Attacks on Masked Lattice-Based Encryption
Although lattice-based cryptography has proven to be a particularly efficient approach to post-quantum cryptography, its security against side-channel attacks is still a very open topic. There already exist some first works that use masking to achieve DPA security. However, for public-key primitives SPA attacks that use just a single trace are also highly relevant. For lattice-based cryptography this implementation-security aspect is still unexplored.In this work, we present the first single-trace attack on lattice-based encryption. As only a single side-channel observation is needed for full key recovery, it can also be used to attack masked implementations. We use leakage coming from the Number Theoretic Transform, which is at the heart of almost all efficient lattice-based implementations. This means that our attack can be adapted to a large range of other lattice-based constructions and their respective implementations.Our attack consists of 3 main steps. First, we perform a template matching on all modular operations in the decryption process. Second, we efficiently combine all this side-channel information using belief propagation. And third, we perform a lattice-decoding to recover the private key. We show that the attack allows full key recovery not only in a generic noisy Hamming-weight setting, but also based on real traces measured on an ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller.
2013
CHES

Program Committees

CHES 2021
CHES 2020
CHES 2019