COSIC seminar 'Signature Correction Attacks on Post-quantum Schemes' (Berk Sunar)

COSIC seminar – Signature Correction Attacks on Post-quantum Schemes – Berk Sunar (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)

After a six year long competition in July the US NIST announced the first four quantum resistant algorithms considered for standardization: Crystals-Kyber is a KEM, and signature schemes Crystals-Dilithium, Falcon and SPHINCS+. As companies prepare to deploy these newly standardized schemes, it becomes essential to secure implementations against side-channel attacks. Indeed many NIST submissions already included constant-time implementations for this very reason.

In this talk we outline a new class of fault injection attacks, collectively called Signature Correction Attacks (SCA), targeting post-quantum signature schemes. While SCA works with many fault mechanisms, it becomes especially effective on platforms vulnerable to Rowhammer thus yielding a software only attack. We outline two SCA attack results targeting LUOV and Crystals-Dilithium using Rowhammer on their reference implementations. We also outline the additional processing steps required to amplify the recovered partial information to full key recovery.