Mgr. Tomáš Rabas

Publikace

Profiling Side-Channel Attack on HQC Polynomial Multiplication Using Machine Learning Methods

Autoři
Rabas, T.; Buček, J.; Grosso, V.; Zenknerová, K.; Lórencz, R.
Rok
2026
Publikováno
Constructive Approaches for Security Analysis and Design of Embedded Systems. Springer, Cham, 2026. p. 580-602. vol. 15952 LNCS. ISSN 0302-9743. ISBN 978-3-032-01404-7.
Typ
Stať ve sborníku
Anotace
The Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) cryptosystem was selected for standardization in the 4th round of the NIST post-quantum standardization competition targeting Public-key Encryption and Key-establishment algorithms. In this paper, we propose a profiling power side-channel attack on a HQC cryptosystem exploiting power consumption leakage during polynomial multiplication in the beginning of the decryption. The new attack scheme is based on generic methods such as Welch’s ANOVA test or multilayer perceptron with a grid-search algorithm used for the hyperparameter tuning. Consequently, it is easily extendable also to other side-channel attacks. Results of the practical evaluation are presented, using a 32-bit STM32F303 Arm Cortex-M4 processor as a target. We show that a trained model is able to recover the correct key bit from large majority of tests – in the practical evaluation, maximum 6 out of 20 000 tests failed in recovering the correct key bit. For the testing, we follow a single-trace scenario, which assumes that only one decryption power trace is available.

Simple Power Analysis of Polynomial Multiplication in HQC

Autoři
Velek, P.; Rabas, T.; Buček, J.
Rok
2026
Publikováno
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy. Madeira: SciTePress, 2026. p. 299-306. vol. 2. ISSN 2184-4356. ISBN 978-989-758-800-6.
Typ
Stať ve sborníku
Anotace
The Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) cryptosystem was selected for standardization in the fourth round of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization project. The goal of the PQC project is to standardize one or more quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we present a single-trace Simple Power Analysis (SPA) attack against HQC that exploits power consumption leakage that occurs during polynomial multiplication performed at the beginning of HQC decryption. Using the ChipWhisperer-Lite board, we perform and evaluate the attack, achieving a 99.69 % success rate over 10 000 attack attempts. We also propose various countermeasures against the attack and evaluate their time complexity.

Single-Trace Side-Channel Attacks on NTRU Implementation

Rok
2024
Publikováno
SN Computer Science. 2024, 5(2), 1-11. ISSN 2661-8907.
Typ
Článek
Anotace
Most of the currently used cryptosystems are not secure in the presence of cryptographically relevant quantum computers. As the research in quantum technologies proceeds, a need for quantum-safe cryptography is imminent. NTRU is a post-quantum public-key cryptosystem based on lattices and was a finalist in the 3rd round of the post-quantum standardization process organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This paper aims to study the implementation security of the cryptosystem with respect to an attacker with access to power leakage. Such a threat model is relevant especially, but not only, for embedded devices. We studied a countermeasure implementation of the NTRU decryption algorithm from An et al. (Appl Sci https://doi.org/10.3390/app8112014 , 2018) that claimed its security against power attacks. This paper revisits an attack presented in as reported by Rabas (In: Proceedings of the9th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy,ICISSP 2023, Lisbon, 2023) that shows it is in fact vulnerable even in the case of just a single trace available to the enemy for extracting the key. We then describe a new profiling template attack on the implementation and show experimental results of the attack using the same datasets, resulting in a comparison of these two methods and further confirmation of the vulnerability of the algorithm even to generic profiling attacks. Several possible types of countermeasures are discussed.

Single-Trace Attack on NTRU Decryption with Machine Learning and Template Profiling

Rok
2023
Publikováno
2023 26th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD). Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society, 2023. p. 124-129. ISSN 2771-2508. ISBN 979-8-3503-4419-6.
Typ
Stať ve sborníku
Anotace
NTRU is a post-quantum public key cryptosystem based on lattices and was a finalist in the 3rd round of the post-quantum standardization process organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). We present a new single-trace attack against the NTRU decryption algorithm, meaning we can obtain the private key only from one power trace, assuming the profiling phase was conducted before the attack. The attack was performed on the submission implementation from the standardization process. We used several machine learning methods and Template attacks for the profiling and testing phase. Both methods achieve high accuracy reaching almost 100% tested on more than 12 000 traces. We also provide a comparison of their success score with regard to a different number of points of interest

SPA Attack on NTRU Protected Implementation with Sparse Representation of Private Key

Rok
2023
Publikováno
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy. Madeira: SciTePress, 2023. p. 135-143. ISSN 2184-4356. ISBN 978-989-758-624-8.
Typ
Stať ve sborníku
Anotace
NTRU is a post-quantum public-key, lattice-based cryptosystem. Several suggested implementations claim to be simple-power analysis resistant. One of these implementations was described in (An et al., 2018) using a sparse representation of a private key and a new design of an algorithm for the multiplication of polynomials. We show that it is still vulnerable. We theoretically explain a vulnerability in the algorithm description that could potentially lead to a single-trace attack. We practically perform the attack on two targets with different architectures: an 8-bit microcontroller of the AVR family and a 32-bit microcontroller ARM Cortex-M0. Statistical analysis performed on the second target, measured by the ChipWhisperer platform, shows that with a chance of 91.0% we get the correct key just from one measured trace. Ability to get two measurements raises our probability of a successful attack up to 99.6%.

Verification of PUF-based IoT Protocols with AVISPA and Scyther

Rok
2022
Publikováno
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Security and Cryptography. Madeira: SciTePress, 2022. p. 627-635. ISSN 2184-7711. ISBN 978-989-758-590-6.
Typ
Stať ve sborníku
Anotace
Paper from 2020 (Buchovecká et al., 2020) suggests protocols suitable for lightweight IoT Devices. They are based on physical unclonable functions (PUF) which among others simplify the problem of key management on simple hardware devices and microcontrollers. These protocols are supposed to authenticate a device and distribute keys safely so that only the intended parties can know the key. We analysed suggested protocols using two automated verification tools AVISPA and Scyther. The analysis shows that there are several issues concerning the authentication property. We demonstrate the results from the tools and describe several attacks that exploit this vulnerability. Finally, we provide modified versions of these protocols that are resistant to those attacks and satisfy authentication as desired.