Paper 2022/1452 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2022/1452 ↗

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

Yanning Ji
Ruize Wang
Kalle Ngo
Elena Dubrova
Linus Backlund
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.
History
2022-10-24: last updated
2022-10-24: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/1452
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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}
}
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