Paper 2026/619 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2026/619 ↗
Breaking the One-Way Property of a SHA-3 Implementation via Fault Injection: Key Recovery Attacks on Post-Quantum Digital Signatures
Abstract
This paper presents fault‑injection attacks on six candidates of the Round‑2 NIST post‑quantum digital signatures call: code-based schemes CROSS and LESS, multivariate schemes MAYO, and MPC-in-the-Head schemes Mirath, RYDE, and PERK. These schemes rely on SHA‑3‑based hash functions to securely embed secret-dependent values in the signature construction. We show that a single instruction skip fault targeting the Keccak-f permutation during the sponge squeezing phase can reveal these secret values and enable full key recovery. The attacks break the one‑way property of the affected SHA‑3 implementation, as the fault allows recovering the function's input from its output. We experimentally validate the attacks on the optimised pqm4 ARM Cortex-M4 CROSS implementation via instruction-skipping using voltage glitching, and present practical countermeasures.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
PDF- Category
- Attacks and cryptanalysis
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- History
- 2026-03-30: last updated
- 2026-03-30: published
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2026/619
- License
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/619,
author = {Mona Sobhani and Sönke Jendral and Elena Dubrova and Mats Näslund},
title = {Breaking the One-Way Property of a SHA-3 Implementation via Fault Injection: Key Recovery Attacks on Post-Quantum Digital Signatures},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/619},
year = {2026},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/619}
}