A Side-Channel Attack on a Hardware Implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber

Yanning Ji; Ruize Wang; Kalle Ngo; Elena Dubrova; Linus Backlund

Paper 2022/1452

A Side-Channel Attack on a Hardware Implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber

Yanning Ji, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Ruize Wang, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Kalle Ngo, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Elena Dubrova, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Linus Backlund, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Abstract

CRYSTALS-Kyber has been recently selected by the NIST as a new public-key encryption and key-establishment algorithm to be standardized. This makes it important to assess how well CRYSTALS-Kyber implementations withstand side-channel attacks. Software implementations of CRYSTALS-Kyber have been already analyzed and the discovered vulnerabilities were patched in the subsequently released versions. In this paper, we present a profiling side-channel attack on a hardware implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber with the security parameter $k = 3$, Kyber768. Since hardware implementations carry out computation in parallel, they are typically more difficult to break than their software counterparts. We demonstrate a successful message (session key) recovery by deep learning-based power analysis. Our results indicate that currently available hardware implementations of CRYSTALS-Kyber need better protection against side-channel attacks.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: post-quantum cryptography CRYSTALS-Kyber LWE-based KEM side-channel attack FPGA power analysis deep learning
Contact author(s): yanning @ kth se
ruize @ kth se
kngo @ kth se
dubrova @ kth se
lbackl @ kth se
History: 2022-10-25: approved; 2022-10-24: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2022/1452
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/1452,
      author = {Yanning Ji and Ruize Wang and Kalle Ngo and Elena Dubrova and Linus Backlund},
      title = {A Side-Channel Attack on a Hardware Implementation of {CRYSTALS}-Kyber},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/1452},
      year = {2022},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1452}
}