Paper 2024/1106 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2024/1106 ↗

Masked Vector Sampling for HQC

Maxime Spyropoulos
David Vigilant
Fabrice Perion
Renaud Pacalet
Laurent Sauvage
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 three others already 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.
History
2024-10-11: last updated
2024-07-07: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/1106
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1106}
}
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