Paper 2024/1106

Masked Vector Sampling for HQC

Maxime Spyropoulos, Télécom Paris, Thales DIS
David Vigilant, Thales DIS
Fabrice Perion, Thales DIS
Renaud Pacalet, Télécom Paris
Laurent Sauvage, Télécom Paris
Abstract

Anticipating the advent of large quantum computers, NIST started a worldwide competition in 2016 aiming to define the next cryptographic standards. HQC is one of these post-quantum schemes still in contention, with four others already in the process of being standardized. In 2022, Guo et al. introduced a timing attack that exploited an inconsistency in HQC rejection sampling function to recover its secret key in 866,000 calls to an oracle. The authors of HQC updated its specification by applying an algorithm to sample vectors in constant time. A masked implementation of this function was then proposed for BIKE but it is not directly applicable to HQC. In this paper we propose a masked specification-compliant version of HQC vector sampling function which relies, to our knowledge, on the first masked implementation of the Barrett reduction.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
HQCMaskingSide-channel attackPost-quantum cryptography
Contact author(s)
maxime spyropoulos @ telecom-paris fr
david vigilant @ thalesgroup com
fabrice perion @ thalesgroup com
renaud pacalet @ telecom-paris fr
laurent sauvage @ telecom-paris fr
History
2024-07-08: approved
2024-07-07: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/1106
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/1106,
      author = {Maxime Spyropoulos and David Vigilant and Fabrice Perion and Renaud Pacalet and Laurent Sauvage},
      title = {Masked Vector Sampling for {HQC}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2024/1106},
      year = {2024},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1106}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1106}
}
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