International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

A Systematic Approach and Analysis of Key Mismatch Attacks on Lattice-Based NIST Candidate KEMs

Authors:
Yue Qin , China University of Geosciences, Wuhan
Chi Cheng , China University of Geosciences, Wuhan
Xiaohan Zhang , China University of Geosciences, Wuhan
Yanbin Pan , Chinese Academy of Sciences
Lei Hu , Chinese Academy of Sciences
Jintai Ding , Tsinghua University
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-92068-5_4
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Presentation: Slides
Conference: ASIACRYPT 2021
Abstract: Research on key mismatch attacks against lattice-based KEMs is an important part of the cryptographic assessment of the ongoing NIST standardization of post-quantum cryptography. There have been a number of these attacks to date. However, a unified method to evaluate these KEMs' resilience under key mismatch attacks is still missing. Since the key index of efficiency is the number of queries needed to successfully mount such an attack, in this paper, we propose and develop a systematic approach to find lower bounds on the minimum average number of queries needed for such attacks. Our basic idea is to transform the problem of finding the lower bound of queries into finding an optimal binary recovery tree (BRT), where the computations of the lower bounds become essentially the computations of a certain Shannon entropy. The optimal BRT approach also enables us to understand why, for some lattice-based NIST candidate KEMs, there is a big gap between the theoretical bounds and bounds observed in practical attacks, in terms of the number of queries needed. This further leads us to propose a generic improvement method for these existing attacks, which are confirmed by our experiments. Moreover, our proposed method could be directly used to improve the side-channel attacks against CCA-secure NIST candidate KEMs.
Video from ASIACRYPT 2021
BibTeX
@inproceedings{asiacrypt-2021-31489,
  title={A Systematic Approach and Analysis of Key Mismatch Attacks on Lattice-Based NIST Candidate KEMs},
  publisher={Springer-Verlag},
  doi={10.1007/978-3-030-92068-5_4},
  author={Yue Qin and Chi Cheng and Xiaohan Zhang and Yanbin Pan and Lei Hu and Jintai Ding},
  year=2021
}