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A Practical Key-Recovery Attack on LWE-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism Schemes Using Rowhammer

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Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS 2024)

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Abstract

Physical attacks are serious threats to cryptosystems deployed in the real world. In this work, we propose a microarchitectural end-to-end attack methodology on generic lattice-based post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms to recover the long-term secret key. Our attack targets a critical component of a Fujisaki-Okamoto transform that is used in the construction of almost all lattice-based key encapsulation mechanisms. We demonstrate our attack model on practical schemes such as Kyber and Saber by using Rowhammer. We show that our attack is highly practical and imposes little preconditions on the attacker to succeed. As an additional contribution, we propose an improved version of the plaintext checking oracle, which is used by almost all physical attack strategies on lattice-based key-encapsulation mechanisms. Our improvement reduces the number of queries to the plaintext checking oracle by as much as \(39\%\) for Saber and approximately \(23\%\) for Kyber768. This can be of independent interest and can also be used to reduce the complexity of other attacks.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “https://github.com/vusec/hammertime.git”.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Horizon 2020 ERC Advanced Grant (101020005 Belfort), CyberSecurity Research Flanders with reference number VR20192203, BE QCI: Belgian-QCI (3E230370) (see beqci.eu), and Intel Corporation.

Angshuman Karmakar is funded by FWO (Research Foundation - Flanders) as a junior post-doctoral fellow (contract number 203056/1241722N LV). Puja Mondal and Angshuman Karmakar are also supported by C3iHub, IIT Kanpur.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur, Kanpur, India

    Puja Mondal & Angshuman Karmakar

  2. COSIC, KU Leuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, BUS, 2452, B-3001, Leuven-Heverlee, Belgium

    Suparna Kundu, Angshuman Karmakar & Ingrid Verbauwhede

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur, Kharagpur, India

    Sarani Bhattacharya

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  1. Puja Mondal
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  1. New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Christina Pöpper

  2. Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Lejla Batina

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Mondal, P., Kundu, S., Bhattacharya, S., Karmakar, A., Verbauwhede, I. (2024). A Practical Key-Recovery Attack on LWE-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism Schemes Using Rowhammer. In: Pöpper, C., Batina, L. (eds) Applied Cryptography and Network Security. ACNS 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14585. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54776-8_11

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