Quantum cryptography

Summary

Quantum cryptography is the science of exploiting quantum mechanical properties to perform cryptographic tasks. The best known example of quantum cryptography is quantum key distribution which offers an information-theoretically secure solution to the key exchange problem. The advantage of quantum cryptography lies in the fact that it allows the completion of various cryptographic tasks that are proven or conjectured to be impossible using only classical (i.e. non-quantum) communication. For example, it is impossible to copy data encoded in a quantum state. If one attempts to read the encoded data, the quantum state will be changed due to wave function collapse (no-cloning theorem). This could be used to detect eavesdropping in quantum key distribution (QKD). History In the early 1970s, Stephen Wiesner, then at Columbia University in New York, introduced the concept of quantum conjugate coding. His seminal paper titled "Conjugate Coding" was rejected by the IEEE Information

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Non-malleable codes are a generalization of classical error-correcting codes where the act of "corrupting" a codeword is replaced by a "tampering" adversary. Non-malleable codes guarantee that the message contained in the tampered codeword is either the original message m, or a completely unrelated one. In the common split-state model, the codeword consists of multiple blocks (or states) and each block is tampered with independently. The central goal in the split-state model is to construct high rate non-malleable codes against all functions with only two states (which are necessary). Following a series of long and impressive line of work, constant rate, two-state, non-malleable codes against all functions were recently achieved by Aggarwal et al. [2]. Though constant, the rate of all known constructions in the split state model is very far from optimal (even with more than two states). In this work, we consider the question of improving the rate of splitstate non-malleable codes. In the "information theoretic" setting, it is not possible to go beyond rate 1/2. We therefore focus on the standard computational setting. In this setting, each tampering function is required to be efficiently computable, and the message in the tampered codeword is required to be either the original message m or a "computationally" independent one. In this setting, assuming only the existence of one-way functions, we present a compiler which converts any poor rate, two-state, (sufficiently strong) non-malleable code into a rate-1, two-state, computational non-malleable code. These parameters are asymptotically optimal. Furthermore, for the qualitative optimality of our result, we generalize the result of Cheraghchi and Guruswami [10] to show that the existence of one-way functions is necessary to achieve rate > 1/2 for such codes. Our compiler requires a stronger form of non-malleability, called augmented non-malleability. This notion requires a stronger simulation guarantee for non-malleable codes and simplifies their modular usage in cryptographic settings where composition occurs. Unfortunately, this form of non-malleability is neither straightforward nor generally guaranteed by known results. Nevertheless, we prove this stronger form of non-malleability for the two-state construction of Aggarwal et al. [3]. This result is of independent interest.

Springer Int Publishing Ag2016

Attacks on some post-quantum cryptographic protocols: The case of the Legendre PRF and SIKE

Novak Kaluderovic

Post-quantum cryptography is a branch of cryptography which deals with cryptographic algorithms whose hardness assumptions are not based on problems known to be solvable by a quantum computer, such as the RSA problem, factoring or discrete logarithms.This thesis treats two such algorithms and provides theoretical and practical attacks against them.The first protocol is the generalised Legendre pseudorandom function - a random bit generator computed as the Legendre symbol of the evaluation of a secret polynomial at an element of a finite field. We introduce a new point of view on the protocol by analysing the action of the group of Möbius transformations on the set of secret keys (secret polynomials).We provide a key extraction attack by creating a table which is cubic in the number of the function queries, an improvement over the previous algorithms which only provided a quadratic yield. Furthermore we provide an ever stronger attack for a new set of particularly weak keys.The second protocol that we cover is SIKE - supersingular isogeny key encapsulation.In 2017 the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) opened a call for standardisation of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms. One of the candidates, currently listed as an alternative key encapsulation candidate in the third round of the standardisation process, is SIKE.We provide three practical side-channel attacks on the 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 implementation of SIKE.The first attack targets the elliptic curve scalar multiplication, implemented as a three-point ladder in SIKE. The lack of coordinate randomisation is observed, and used to attack the ladder by means of a differential power analysis algorithm.This allows us to extract the full secret key of the target party with only one power trace.The second attack assumes coordinate randomisation is implemented and provides a zero-value attack - the target party is forced to compute the field element zero, which cannot be protected by randomisation. In particular we target both the three-point ladder and isogeny computation in two separate attacks by providing maliciously generated public keys made of elliptic curve points of irregular order.We show that an order-checking countermeasure is effective, but comes at a price of 10% computational overhead. Furthermore we show how to modify the implementation so that it can be protected from all zero-value attacks, i.e., a zero-value is never computed during the execution of the algorithm.Finally, the last attack targets a point swapping procedure which is a subroutine of the three-point ladder. The attack successfully extracts the full secret key with only one power trace even if the implementation is protected with coordinate randomisation or order-checking. We provide an effective countermeasure --- an improved point swapping algorithm which protects the implementation from our attack.

EPFL2022

Using the new VPMADD instructions for the new post quantum key encapsulation mechanism SIKE

Dusan Kostic

This paper demonstrates the use of new processor instructions VPMADD, intended to appear in the coming generation of Intel processors (codename "Cannon Lake"), in order to accelerate the newly proposed key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) named SIKE. SIKE is one of the submissions to the NIST standardization process on post-quantum cryptography, and is based on pseudo-random walks in supersingular isogeny graphs. While very small keys are the main advantage of SIKE, its extreme computational intensiveness makes it one of the slowest KEM proposals. Performance optimizations are needed. We address here the "Level 1" parameters that target 64-bit quantum security, and deemed sufficient for the NIST standardization effort. Thus, we focus on SIKE503 that operates over F p2 with a 503-bit prime p. These short operands pose a significant challenge on using VPMADD effectively. We demonstrate several optimization methods to accelerate F-p, F-p2, and the elliptic curve arithmetic, and predict a potential speedup by a factor of 1.72x.

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2019

Attacks on some post-quantum cryptographic protocols: The case of the Legendre PRF and SIKE

Novak Kaluderovic

EPFL2022

Springer Int Publishing Ag2016