Defeating Low-Cost Countermeasures against Side-Channel Attacks in Lattice-based Encryption : A Case Study on Crystals-Kyber

Abstract: In an effort to circumvent the high cost of standard countermeasures against side-channel attacks in post-quantum cryptography, some works have developed low-cost detection-based countermeasures. These countermeasures try to detect maliciously generated input ciphertexts and react to them by discarding the ciphertext or secret key. In this work, we take a look at two previously proposed low-cost countermeasures: the ciphertext sanity check and the decapsulation failure check, and demonstrate successful attacks on these schemes. We show that the first countermeasure can be broken with little to no overhead, while the second countermeasure requires a more elaborate attack strategy that relies on valid chosen ciphertexts. Thus, in this work, we propose the first chosen-ciphertext based side-channel attack that only relies on valid ciphertexts for key recovery. As part of this attack, a third contribution of our paper is an improved solver that retrieves the secret key from linear ineq.... https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/11447

Object Details

• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Defeating Low-Cost Countermeasures against Side-Channel Attacks in Lattice-based Encryption ; volume:2024 ; number:2 ; year:2024 ; IACR transactions on cryptographic hardware and embedded systems ; 2024, Heft 2 (2024)

Contributors, Places and Time

• Creator: Ravi, Prasanna ; Paiva, Thales ; Jap, Dirmanto ; D’Anvers, Jan-Pieter ; Bhasin, Shivam

Further information

• DOI: 10.46586/tches.v2024.i2.795-818
• URN: urn:nbn:de:101:1-2024032017571391094159
• Rights: Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.
• Last update: 14.08.2025, 10:46 AM CEST