International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We present a set of physical profiled attacks against CRYSTALS-Dilithium that accumulate noisy knowledge on secret keys over multiple signatures, finally leading to a full key recovery attack. The methodology is composed of two steps. The first step consists of observing or inserting a bias in the posterior distribution of sensitive variables. The second step is an information processing phase which is based on belief propagation and effectively exploits that bias. The proposed concrete attacks rely on side-channel information, induced faults or possibly a combination of the two. Interestingly, the adversary benefits most from this previous knowledge when targeting the released signatures, however, the latter are not strictly necessary. We show that the combination of a physical attack with the binary knowledge of acceptance or rejection of a signature also leads to exploitable information on the secret key. Finally, we demonstrate that this approach is also effective against shuffled implementations of CRYSTALS-Dilithium.

FrodoKEM is a lattice-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) based on unstructured lattices. From a security point of view this makes it a conservative option to achieve post-quantum security, hence why it is favored by several European authorities (e.g., German BSI and French ANSSI). Relying on unstructured instead of structured lattices (e.g., CRYSTALS-Kyber) comes at the cost of additional memory usage, which is particularly critical for embedded security applications such as smart cards. For example, prior FrodoKEM-640 implementations (using AES) on Cortex-M4 require more than 80 kB of stack making it impossible to run on some embedded systems. In this work, we explore several stack reduction strategies and the resulting time versus memory trade-offs. Concretely, we reduce the stack consumption of FrodoKEM by a factor 2–3x compared to the smallest known implementations with almost no impact on performance. We also present various time-memory trade-offs going as low as 8 kB for all AES parameter sets, and below 4 kB for FrodoKEM-640. By introducing a minor tweak to the FrodoKEM specifications, we additionally reduce the stack consumption down to 8 kB for all the SHAKE versions. As a result, this work enables FrodoKEM on more resource constrained embedded systems.

CRYSTALS-Dilithium has been selected by the NIST as the new standard for post-quantum digital signatures. In this work, we revisit the side-channel countermeasures of Dilithium in three directions. First, we improve its sensitivity analysis by classifying intermediate computations according to their physical security requirements. Second, we provide improved gadgets dedicated to Dilithium, taking advantage of recent advances in masking conversion algorithms. Third, we combine these contributions and report performance for side-channel protected Dilithium implementations. Our benchmarking results additionally put forward that the randomized version of Dilithium can lead to significantly more efficient implementations (than its deterministic version) when side-channel attacks are a concern.

The post-quantum digital signature scheme CRYSTALS-Dilithium has been recently selected by the NIST for standardization. Implementing CRYSTALSDilithium, and other post-quantum cryptography schemes, on embedded devices raises a new set of challenges, including ones related to performance in terms of speed and memory requirements, but also related to side-channel and fault injection attacks security. In this work, we investigated the latter and describe a differential fault attack on the randomized and deterministic versions of CRYSTALS-Dilithium. Notably, the attack requires a few instructions skips and is able to reduce the MLWE problem that Dilithium is based on to a smaller RLWE problem which can be practically solved with lattice reduction techniques. Accordingly, we demonstrated key recoveries using hints extracted on the secret keys from the same faulted signatures using the LWE with side-information framework introduced by Dachman-Soled et al. at CRYPTO’20. As a final contribution, we proposed algorithmic countermeasures against this attack and in particular showed that the second one can be parameterized to only induce a negligible overhead over the signature generation.

NIST recently announced Kyber and Dilithium as first winners of their post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization effort. While the two are more suitable for constrained applications relative to other PQC schemes, their implementation in commercial embedded platforms still poses a non-trivial challenge, especially since many embedded use cases require hardening against physical attacks. As any delay in the transition to this new standard could have severe consequences for security critical use cases which require certified hardened designs, e.g., payment or automotive, the industrial and academic communities are actively investigating and solving issues that could arise. While for Kyber there is already an extensive list of such issues, Dilithium has been significantly less explored in the context of physical security. As there are multiple variants (deterministic, randomized, hedged) of Dilithium of which only a subset might be included in the standard, it is of utmost importance to quantify and understand the implications of each type on physical security. In this talk, we present the dos and don’ts of hardening Dilithium against a side-channel adversary, which were acquired during a detailed and lengthy analysis inside NXP. To this end, we first list the issues of each Dilithium variant regarding side-channel hardening, quantify the resulting implementation costs and highlight the noticeable overhead introduced by deterministic approaches. By exploring minor modifications to the underlying algorithm, we demonstrate that standardizing a variant, which is not optimized for physical security, would have a significant negative impact on the performance of hardened Dilithium on embedded devices. Instead, we propose that a slightly-modified randomized Dilithium should be considered during the standardization effort and recommended as the default choice for constrained platforms. It is our expectation that this would immensely support the transition to the future PQC standard on embedded devices.

Solely functionally-correct cryptographic implementations are often not sufficient in many real-world use-cases. For example, many payment, transit and identity use-cases require protection against advanced side-channel attacks, using certified implementations to protect the users and their data. In this presentation, we demonstrate that realizing this for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is significantly more complex and computationally expensive compared to its classical public-key counterparts (RSA and ECC). The core of the issue is the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transform, used in many key-exchange finalists considered for standardization, which allows for very powerful chosen-ciphertext side-channel attacks. While this attack vector is known in academia and used to break unprotected and protected implementations of PQC with very few traces, it is our impression that the practical impact has not yet been fully grasped by the applied cryptographic community. In this talk, we highlight the problems that arise with variants of the FO transformation regarding side-channel analysis, quantify the impact, and show that first order masking alone is not sufficient for many practical use-cases. Through a case study of Kyber, we demonstrate that achieving the same level of protection we are used to in hardened RSA and ECC implementations is much more costly and involved for PQC algorithms that are based on the FO transform. This increased overhead comes on top of the already larger and more computationally expensive PQC algorithms. As the targeted embedded devices for these hardened implementations are often very restricted, it is not trivial to find a balance in practice between sufficient security and acceptable performance. To conclude the talk, we discuss the overarching impact of our results on industry and provide potential directions forward to overcome this threat.

In the final phase of the post-quantum cryptography standardization effort, the focus has been extended to include the side-channel resistance of the candidates. While some schemes have been already extensively analyzed in this regard, there is no such study yet of the finalist Kyber.In this work, we demonstrate the first completely masked implementation of Kyber which is protected against first- and higher-order attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this results in the first higher-order masked implementation of any post-quantum secure key encapsulation mechanism algorithm. This is realized by introducing two new techniques. First, we propose a higher-order algorithm for the one-bit compression operation. This is based on a masked bit-sliced binary-search that can be applied to prime moduli. Second, we propose a technique which enables one to compare uncompressed masked polynomials with compressed public polynomials. This avoids the costly masking of the ciphertext compression while being able to be instantiated at arbitrary orders.We show performance results for first-, second- and third-order protected implementations on the Arm Cortex-M0+ and Cortex-M4F. Notably, our implementation of first-order masked Kyber decapsulation requires 3.1 million cycles on the Cortex-M4F. This is a factor 3.5 overhead compared to the unprotected optimized implementationin pqm4. We experimentally show that the first-order implementation of our new modules on the Cortex-M0+ is hardened against attacks using 100 000 traces and mechanically verify the security in a fine-grained leakage model using the verification tool scVerif.

We present efficient and compact hardware/software co-design implementations of the Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) protocol on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In order to be better equipped for different post-quantum scenarios, our architectures were designed to feature high-flexibility by covering all the currently available parameter sets and with support for primes up to 1016 bits. In particular, any of the current SIKE parameters equivalent to the post-quantum security of AES-128/192/256 and SHA3-256 can be selected and run on-the-fly. This security scalability property, together with the small footprint and efficiency of our architectures, makes them ideal for embedded applications in a post-quantum world. In addition, the proposed implementations exhibit regular, constant-time execution, which provides protection against timing and simple sidechannel attacks. Our results demonstrate that supersingular isogeny-based primitives such as SIDH and SIKE can indeed be deployed for embedded applications featuring competitive performance. For example, our smallest architecture based on a 128-bit MAC unit takes only 3415 slices, 21 BRAMs and 57 DSPs on a Virtex 7 690T and can perform key generation, encapsulation and decapsulation in 14.4, 24.4 and 26.0 milliseconds for SIKEp434 and in 52.3, 86.4 and 93.2 milliseconds for SIKEp751, respectively.

The main contribution of this work is an optimized implementation of the van Oorschot-Wiener (vOW) parallel collision finding algorithm. As is typical for cryptanalysis against conjectured hard problems (e. g. factoring or discrete logarithms), challenges can arise in the implementation that are not captured in the theory, making the performance of the algorithm in practice a crucial element of estimating security. We present a number of novel improvements, both to generic instantiations of the vOW algorithm finding collisions in arbitrary functions, and to its instantiation in the context of the supersingular isogeny key encapsulation (SIKE) protocol, that culminate in an improved classical cryptanalysis of the computational supersingular isogeny (CSSI) problem. In particular, we present a scalable implementation that can be applied to the Round-2 parameter sets of SIKE that can be used to give confidence in their security levels.

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, Custódio, and Martina (PZMCM) at ISCC 2018, that changes the XMSS signing algorithm to search for rapidly 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 resulting verification speed and support it by experiments. We present a record setting RFC compatible implementation of XMSS verification on the ARM Cortex-M4. At a signing time of about one minute on a general purpose CPU, we create signatures that are verified about 1.44 times faster than traditionally generated signatures. Adding further well-known implementation optimizations to the verification algorithm we reduce verification time by over a factor two from 13.85 million to 6.56 million cycles. In contrast to previous works, we provide a detailed security analysis of the resulting signature scheme under classical and quantum attacks that justifies our selection of parameters. On the way, we fill a gap in the security analysis of XMSS as described in RFC 8391 proving that the modified message hashing in the RFC does indeed mitigate multi-target attacks. This was not shown before and might be of independent interest.

The isogeny-based protocols SIDH and SIKE have received much attention for being post-quantum key agreement candidates that retain relatively small keys. A recent line of work has proposed and further improved compression of public keys, leading to the inclusion of public-key compression in the SIKE proposal for Round 2 of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization effort. We show how to employ the dual isogeny to significantly increase performance of compression techniques, reducing their overhead from 160–182% to 77–86% for Alice’s key generation and from 98–104% to 59–61% for Bob’s across different SIDH parameter sets. For SIKE, we reduce the overhead of (1) key generation from 140–153% to 61–74%, (2) key encapsulation from 67–90% to 38–57%, and (3) decapsulation from 59–65% to 34–39%. This is mostly achieved by speeding up the pairing computations, which has until now been the main bottleneck, but we also improve (deterministic) basis generation.

We propose an efficient commutative group action suitable for non-interactive key exchange in a post-quantum setting. Our construction follows the layout of the Couveignes–Rostovtsev–Stolbunov cryptosystem, but we apply it to supersingular elliptic curves defined over a large prime field $$\mathbb F_p$$, rather than to ordinary elliptic curves. The Diffie–Hellman scheme resulting from the group action allows for public-key validation at very little cost, runs reasonably fast in practice, and has public keys of only 64 bytes at a conjectured AES-128 security level, matching NIST’s post-quantum security category I.