A Complete and Optimized Key Mismatch Attack on NIST Candidate NewHope

Yue Qin, Chi Cheng*, Jintai Ding

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book or Report/Conference proceedingConference Proceedingpeer-review

18 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In CT-RSA 2019, Bauer et al. have analyzed the case when the public key is reused for the NewHope key encapsulation mechanism (KEM), a second-round candidate in the NIST Post-quantum Standard process. They proposed an elegant method to recover coefficients ranging from -6 to 4 in the secret key. We repeat their experiments but there are two fundamental problems. First, even for coefficients in [−6, 4] we cannot recover at least 262 of them in each secret key with 1024 coefficients. Second, for the coefficient outside [−6, 4], they suggested an exhaustive search. But for each secret key on average there are 10 coefficients that need to be exhaustively searched, and each of them has 6 possibilities. This makes Bauer et al.’s method highly inefficient. We propose an improved method, which with 99.22% probability recovers all the coefficients ranging from -6 to 4 in the secret key. Then, inspired by Ding et al.’s key mismatch attack, we propose an efficient strategy which with a probability of 96.88% succeeds in recovering all the coefficients in the secret key. Experiments show that our proposed method is very efficient, which completes the attack in about 137.56 ms using the NewHope parameters.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputer Security – ESORICS 2019 - 24th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Proceedings
EditorsKazue Sako, Steve Schneider, Peter Y.A. Ryan
PublisherSpringer
Pages504-520
Number of pages17
ISBN (Print)9783030299613
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event24th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2019 - Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Duration: 23 Sept 201927 Sept 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11736 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference24th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2019
Country/TerritoryLuxembourg
CityLuxembourg
Period23/09/1927/09/19

Keywords

  • Key exchange
  • Key mismatch attack
  • Post-quantum cryptography
  • Ring learning with errors

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