Differential power analysis of a McEliece cryptosystem

Open Webpage

Cong Chen, Thomas Eisenbarth

Published: 09 Jan 2016, Last Modified: 30 Sept 2024ACNS 2015EveryoneCC BY 4.0
Abstract: This work presents the first differential power analysis of an implementation of the McEliece cryptosystem. Target of this side-channel attack is a state-of-the-art FPGA implementation of the efficient QC-MDPC McEliece decryption operation as presented at DATE 2014. The presented cryptanalysis succeeds to recover the complete secret key after a few observed decryptions. It consists of a combination of a differential leakage analysis during the syndrome computation followed by an algebraic step that exploits the relation between the public and private key.