Abstract
In this paper we study reaction and timing attacks against cryptosystems based on sparse parity-check codes, which encompass low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and moderate-density parity-check (MDPC) codes. We show that the feasibility of these attacks is not strictly associated to the quasi-cyclic (QC) structure of the code but is related to the intrinsically probabilistic decoding of any sparse parity-check code. So, these attacks not only work against QC codes, but can be generalized to broader classes of codes. We provide a novel algorithm that, in the case of a QC code, allows recovering a larger amount of information than that retrievable through existing attacks and we use this algorithm to characterize new side-channel information leakages. We devise a theoretical model for the decoder that describes and justifies our results. Numerical simulations are provided that confirm the effectiveness of our approach.
The work of Paolo Santini was partially supported by Namirial S.p.A.
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Santini, P., Battaglioni, M., Chiaraluce, F., Baldi, M. (2019). Analysis of Reaction and Timing Attacks Against Cryptosystems Based on Sparse Parity-Check Codes. In: Baldi, M., Persichetti, E., Santini, P. (eds) Code-Based Cryptography. CBC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11666. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25922-8_7
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