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Practical Power Analysis Attacks on Software Implementations of McEliece

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Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQCrypto 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 6061))

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Abstract

The McEliece public-key cryptosystem is based on the fact that decoding unknown linear binary codes is an NP-complete problem. The interest on implementing post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, e.g. McEliece, on microprocessor-based platforms has been extremely raised due to the increasing storage space of these platforms. Therefore, their vulnerability and robustness against physical attacks, e.g., state-of-the-art power analysis attacks, must be investigated. In this work, we address mainly two power analysis attacks on various implementations of McEliece on an 8-bit AVR microprocessor. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such side-channel attacks are practically evaluated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

    Stefan Heyse, Amir Moradi & Christof Paar

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  1. Stefan Heyse
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  2. Amir Moradi
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  3. Christof Paar
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  1. Projet Team SECRET, Centre de Recherche INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt,, B.P. 105, 78153, Le Chesnay Cedex, France

    Nicolas Sendrier

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Heyse, S., Moradi, A., Paar, C. (2010). Practical Power Analysis Attacks on Software Implementations of McEliece. In: Sendrier, N. (eds) Post-Quantum Cryptography. PQCrypto 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6061. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12929-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12929-2_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12928-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12929-2

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