A Side-Channel Attack Against the Secret Permutation on an Embedded McEliece Cryptosystem

Tania Richmond (1) , Martin Petrvalsky (2) , Milos Drutarovsky (2)

1 LHC - Laboratoire Hubert Curien
2 Department of Electronics and Multimedia Communications

—In this paper, based on a thorough analysis of the state of the art, we point out a missing solution for embedded devices to secure the syndrome computation. We show that this weakness can open the door to a side-channel attack targeting the secret permutation. Indeed, brute-force attack iterations are dramatically decreased when the secret permutation is recovered. We demonstrate the feasibility of this attack against the McEliece cryptosystem implemented on an ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor using Goppa codes. We explain how to recover the secret permutation on a toy example. Finally, we propose a promising countermeasure, which can be implemented in embedded devices to prevent this attack.

Mots clés: McEliece cryptosystem; Goppa codes; embedded implementation; simple power analysis

Domaines: Systèmes embarqués; Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Tania Richmond, Martin Petrvalsky, Milos Drutarovsky. A Side-Channel Attack Against the Secret Permutation on an Embedded McEliece Cryptosystem. 3rd Workshop on trustworthy manufacturing and utilization of secure devices - TRUDEVICE 2015, Mar 2015, Grenoble, France. ⟨ujm-01186639⟩