### A Power Side-Channel Attack on the Reed-Muller Reed-Solomon Version of the HQC Cryptosystem

##### Abstract

The code-based post-quantum algorithm Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) is a third round alternative candidate in the NIST standardization project. For their third round version the authors utilize a new combination of error correcting codes, namely a combination of a Reed-Muller and a Reed-Solomon code, which requires an adaption of published attacks. We identify that the power side-channel attack by Uneo et al. from CHES 2021 does not work in practice as they miss the fact that the implemented Reed-Muller decoder does not have a fixed decoding boundary. In this work we provide a novel attack strategy that again allows for a successful attack. Our attack does not rely on simulation to verify it success but is proven with high probability for the HQC parameter sets. In contrast to the timing side-channel attack by Guo et al. we are able to reduce the required attack queries by a factor of 12 and are able to eliminate the inherent uncertainty of their used timing oracle. We show practical attack results utilizing a power side-channel of the used Reed-Solomon decoder on an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. In addition, we provide a discussion on how or whether our attack strategy to be usable with the side-channel targets of mentioned related work. Finally, we use information set decoding to evaluate the remaining attack complexity for partially retrieved secret keys. This work again emphasizes the need for a side-channel secure implementation of all relevant building blocks of HQC.

Available format(s)
Category
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Error Correction HQC Post-Quantum Cryptography Power Analysis Side-Channel Analysis
Contact author(s)
t schamberger @ tum de
lukas holzbaur @ tum de
julian renner @ tum de
antonia wachter-zeh @ tum de
sigl @ tum de
History
2022-06-08: approved
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/724

CC BY-NC-ND

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/724,
author = {Thomas Schamberger and Lukas Holzbaur and Julian Renner and Antonia Wachter-Zeh and Georg Sigl},
title = {A Power Side-Channel Attack on the Reed-Muller Reed-Solomon Version of the HQC Cryptosystem},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/724},
year = {2022},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/724}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/724}
}

Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.