Differential Power Analysis Attack on the Secure Bit Permutation in the McEliece Cryptosystem

Martin Petrvalsky (1) , Tania Richmond (2, 3) , Milos Drutarovsky (1) , Pierre-Louis Cayrel (3) , Viktor Fischer (3)

1 Department of Electronics and Multimedia Communications
2 IMATH - Institut de Mathématiques de Toulon - EA 2134
3 LHC - Laboratoire Hubert Curien

The segment of post-quantum cryptography rises its importance with increasing improvements in the quantum computing. Cryptographic post-quantum algorithms have been proposed since 1970s. However, side-channel attack vulnerabili-ties of these algorithms are still in focus of the recent research. In this paper, we present a differential power analysis attack on the McEliece public-key cryptosystem. We demonstrate that a part of a private key, permutation matrix, can be recovered using the power analysis. We attack a software implementation of a secure bit permutation that was proposed by Strenzke et al. at PQCrypto 2008. The cryptosystem is implemented on a 32-bit ARM based microcontroller. We provide details of the attack and results using power consumption measurements of the device. In addition, we outline a novel countermeasure against the introduced attack. The countermeasure uses properties of the linear codes and does not require large amount of random bits which can be profitable for low-cost embedded devices.

Keywords: Differential power analysis; Goppa codes; McEliece cryptosystem; secure bit permutation; side-channel attack

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Embedded Systems; Computer Science [cs]; Cryptography and Security [cs.CR]

Martin Petrvalsky, Tania Richmond, Milos Drutarovsky, Pierre-Louis Cayrel, Viktor Fischer. Differential Power Analysis Attack on the Secure Bit Permutation in the McEliece Cryptosystem. Conference Radioelektronika 2016, Apr 2016, Kosice, Slovakia. ⟨ujm-01298097⟩