Paper 2024/169

Machine Learning based Blind Side-Channel Attacks on PQC-based KEMs - A Case Study of Kyber KEM

Abstract

Kyber KEM, the NIST selected PQC standard for Public Key Encryption and Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) has been subjected to a variety of side-channel attacks, through the course of the NIST PQC standardization process. However, all these attacks targeting the decapsulation procedure of Kyber KEM either require knowledge of the ciphertexts or require to control the value of ciphertexts for key recovery. However, there are no known attacks in a blind setting, where the attacker does not have access to the ciphertexts. While blind side-channel attacks are known for symmetric key cryptographic schemes, we are not aware of such attacks for Kyber KEM. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing the first blind side-channel attack on Kyber KEM. We target leakage of the pointwise multiplication operation in the decryption procedure to carry out practical blind side-channel attacks resulting in full key recovery. We perform practical validation of our attack using power side-channel from the reference implementation of Kyber KEM taken from the pqm4 library, implemented on the ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. Our experiments clearly indicate the feasibility of our proposed attack in recovering the full key in only a few hundred to few thousand traces, in the presence of a suitably accurate Hamming Weight (HW) classifier.