A Side-Channel Assisted Attack on NTRU

Amund Askeland; Sondre Rønjom

Paper 2021/790

A Side-Channel Assisted Attack on NTRU

Amund Askeland and Sondre Rønjom

Abstract

We take a look at the current implementation of NTRU submitted to the NIST post-quantum standardization project, and identify two strong sources of leakage in the unpacking of the secret key. The strength of the leakages is due to the target processor handling data with very different Hamming weight depending on parts of the secret key. We focus on using only these strong leakages, present a single-trace side-channel attack that reliably recovers a large portion of the secret key, and use lattice reduction techniques to find the remaining parts. Further, we show how small changes to the implementation greatly reduces the leakage without any overhead.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Published elsewhere. NIST PQC conference: https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Events/third-pqc-standardization-conference/documents/accepted-papers/askeland-sid-channel-pqc2021.pdf
Keywords: Post-Quantum Cryptography NTRU Side-channel Attack Power Analysis
Contact author(s): amund askeland @ uib no
History: 2021-06-14: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2021/790
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/790,
      author = {Amund Askeland and Sondre Rønjom},
      title = {A Side-Channel Assisted Attack on {NTRU}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/790},
      year = {2021},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/790}
}