Side-channel attacks on the NIST finalists

The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) started a competition in 2017 to find evaluate, and standardize one or more quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms.
The Round 3 candidates were announced July 22, 2020. In this master thesis, we will focus on code-based cryptosystems (more precisely the Classic McEliece one).
Code-based public-key cryptosystems are promising candidates for standardisation as quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms.
Their security is based on the hardness of the syndrome decoding problem.
Computing the syndrome in a finite field, usually F2, guarantees the security of the constructions.
The problem becomes considerably easier to solve if the syndrome is computed in N instead.
The idea of the master thesis is to consider template attacks to recover the value of the syndrome in N.
We will focus on the encryption and on the decryption process.

Bibliography :
– Message-recovery Laser Fault Injection Attack on Code-based Cryptosystems
Pierre-Louis Cayrel, Brice Colombier, Vlad-Florin Dragoi, Alexandre Menu and Lilian Bossuet
https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/900.pdf
– Side Channel Information Set Decoding using Iterative Chunking
Plaintext Recovery from the “Classic McEliece” Hardware Reference Implementation
Norman Lahr, Ruben Niederhagen, Richard Petri and Simona Samardjiska
https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1459.pdf