Practical power analysis attacks on software implementations of mceliece

  • Authors:
  • Stefan Heyse;Amir Moradi;Christof Paar

  • Affiliations:
  • Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany;Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany;Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

  • Venue:
  • PQCrypto'10 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Post-Quantum Cryptography
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The McEliece public-key cryptosystem is based on the fact that decoding unknown linear binary codes is an NP-complete problem. The interest on implementing post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, e.g. McEliece, on microprocessor-based platforms has been extremely raised due to the increasing storage space of these platforms. Therefore, their vulnerability and robustness against physical attacks, e.g., state-of-the-art power analysis attacks, must be investigated. In this work, we address mainly two power analysis attacks on various implementations of McEliece on an 8-bit AVR microprocessor. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such side-channel attacks are practically evaluated.