International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We present a set of physical profiled attacks against CRYSTALS-Dilithium that accumulate noisy knowledge on secret keys over multiple signatures, finally leading to a full key recovery attack. The methodology is composed of two steps. The first step consists of observing or inserting a bias in the posterior distribution of sensitive variables. The second step is an information processing phase which is based on belief propagation and effectively exploits that bias. The proposed concrete attacks rely on side-channel information, induced faults or possibly a combination of the two. Interestingly, the adversary benefits most from this previous knowledge when targeting the released signatures, however, the latter are not strictly necessary. We show that the combination of a physical attack with the binary knowledge of acceptance or rejection of a signature also leads to exploitable information on the secret key. Finally, we demonstrate that this approach is also effective against shuffled implementations of CRYSTALS-Dilithium.

The post-quantum digital signature scheme CRYSTALS-Dilithium has been recently selected by the NIST for standardization. Implementing CRYSTALSDilithium, and other post-quantum cryptography schemes, on embedded devices raises a new set of challenges, including ones related to performance in terms of speed and memory requirements, but also related to side-channel and fault injection attacks security. In this work, we investigated the latter and describe a differential fault attack on the randomized and deterministic versions of CRYSTALS-Dilithium. Notably, the attack requires a few instructions skips and is able to reduce the MLWE problem that Dilithium is based on to a smaller RLWE problem which can be practically solved with lattice reduction techniques. Accordingly, we demonstrated key recoveries using hints extracted on the secret keys from the same faulted signatures using the LWE with side-information framework introduced by Dachman-Soled et al. at CRYPTO’20. As a final contribution, we proposed algorithmic countermeasures against this attack and in particular showed that the second one can be parameterized to only induce a negligible overhead over the signature generation.