Paper 2015/924

Masking Large Keys in Hardware: A Masked Implementation of McEliece

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

Abstract

Instantiations of the McEliece cryptosystem which are considered computationally secure even in a post-quantum era still require hardening against side channel attacks for practical applications. Recently, the first differential power analysis attack on a McEliece cryptosystem successfully recovered the full secret key of a state-of-the-art FPGA implementation of QC-MDPC McEliece. In this work we show how to apply masking countermeasures to the scheme and present the first masked FPGA implementation that includes these countermeasures. We validate the side channel resistance of our design by practical DPA attacks and statistical tests for leakage detection.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Selected Areas in Cryptography - SAC 2015
Keywords
Threshold ImplementationMcEliece CryptosystemQC-MDPC CodesFPGA
Contact author(s)
teisenbarth @ wpi edu
History
2015-09-22: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/924
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/924,
      author = {Cong Chen and Thomas Eisenbarth and Ingo von Maurich and Rainer Steinwandt},
      title = {Masking Large Keys in Hardware: A Masked Implementation of McEliece},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2015/924},
      year = {2015},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/924}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/924}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.