Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2014/534

Differential Power Analysis of a McEliece Cryptosystem

Cong Chen and Thomas Eisenbarth and Ingo von Maurich and Rainer Steinwandt

Abstract: This work presents the first differential power analysis of an implementation of the McEliece cryptosystem. Target of this side-channel attack is a state-of-the-art FPGA implementation of the efficient QC-MDPC McEliece decryption operation as presented at DATE 2014. The presented cryptanalysis succeeds to recover the complete secret key after a few observed decryptions. It consists of a combination of a differential leakage analysis during the syndrome computation followed by an algebraic step that exploits the relation between the public and private key.

Category / Keywords: public-key cryptography /

Date: received 7 Jul 2014

Contact author: teisenbarth at wpi edu

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20140708:141021 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2014/534