Side Channels in the McEliece PKC

Abstract

The McEliece public key cryptosystem (PKC) is regarded as secure in the presence of quantum computers because no efficient quantum algorithm is known for the underlying problems, which this cryptosystem is built upon. As we show in this paper, a straightforward implementation of this system may feature several side channels. Specifically, we present a Timing Attack which was executed successfully against a software implementation of the McEliece PKC. Furthermore, the critical system components for key generation and decryption are inspected to identify channels enabling power and cache attacks. Implementation aspects are proposed as countermeasures to face these attacks.

Code Based Cryptography and Steganography

“…An 8-bit version for AVR microprocessors and for FPGA is described in [39]. Once again, results show that Mc Eliece's cryptosystem gives better results compared to RSA but not compared to elliptic cryptosystems.. A smart card implementation (16 bits processor) is described in [102], ciphering and deciphering is done in less than 2 seconds for a 2048 code length. Hardware implementations of Mc Eliece's cryptosystem gave rise to several side channel attacks [103,98,66,27,80].…”

Manger’s Attack Revisited

“…We thus recommend to use only logical masking in the implementation of the countermeasure and avoid the use of comparison operators. For the generation of the masks using only logical operations see for instance the example given in [11]. Furthermore, we recommend the use of the volatile specifier, that is part of the C programming language specification.…”

Improved Timing Attacks against the Secret Permutation in the McEliece PKC

“…Falko Strenzke's articles mention several weak points mostly situated in the decoding algorithm [14,16,18,19]. Some of these can be repaired by an intelligent and cautious way of the programming manner where countermeasures were proposed in [1, 3,19]. All of the mentioned attacks were realised on a McEliece PKC implementation using the Patterson algorithm (cf.…”