2 research outputs found
Assessing and countering reaction attacks against post-quantum public-key cryptosystems based on QC-LDPC codes
Code-based public-key cryptosystems based on QC-LDPC and QC-MDPC codes are
promising post-quantum candidates to replace quantum vulnerable classical
alternatives. However, a new type of attacks based on Bob's reactions have
recently been introduced and appear to significantly reduce the length of the
life of any keypair used in these systems. In this paper we estimate the
complexity of all known reaction attacks against QC-LDPC and QC-MDPC code-based
variants of the McEliece cryptosystem. We also show how the structure of the
secret key and, in particular, the secret code rate affect the complexity of
these attacks. It follows from our results that QC-LDPC code-based systems can
indeed withstand reaction attacks, on condition that some specific decoding
algorithms are used and the secret code has a sufficiently high rate.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, to be presented at CANS 201
Analysis of reaction and timing attacks against cryptosystems based on sparse parity-check codes
In this paper we study reaction and timing attacks against cryptosystems
based on sparse parity-check codes, which encompass low-density parity-check
(LDPC) codes and moderate-density parity-check (MDPC) codes. We show that the
feasibility of these attacks is not strictly associated to the quasi-cyclic
(QC) structure of the code but is related to the intrinsically probabilistic
decoding of any sparse parity-check code. So, these attacks not only work
against QC codes, but can be generalized to broader classes of codes. We
provide a novel algorithm that, in the case of a QC code, allows recovering a
larger amount of information than that retrievable through existing attacks and
we use this algorithm to characterize new side-channel information leakages. We
devise a theoretical model for the decoder that describes and justifies our
results. Numerical simulations are provided that confirm the effectiveness of
our approach