OT-PCA: New Key-Recovery Plaintext-Checking Oracle Based Side-Channel Attacks on HQC with Offline Templates
Researchers present OT-PCA, a plaintext-checking side-channel attack that recovers HQC keys with far fewer oracle calls.
The paper introduces OT-PCA, a plaintext-checking oracle side-channel attack against Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC). Offline templates built from the public HQC decoder extract soft information for hundreds of secret positions from a single oracle call. Simulations cut required oracle calls by 2.4 times for hqc-128, with larger gains for hqc-192 and hqc-256; at 95% oracle accuracy the hqc-128 reduction factor rises to 7.6. Power analysis on an ARM Cortex-M4 validates the attack in a laboratory setting.
- OT-PCA builds offline templates using the public HQC decoder.
- One plaintext-checking call yields soft information for hundreds of secret positions.
- Oracle calls fall 2.4 times for hqc-128 versus prior methods.
- At 95% oracle accuracy, the hqc-128 reduction factor reaches 7.6.
- Power analysis on an ARM Cortex-M4 confirms laboratory effectiveness.
- Vendors
- Arm
From the original article
1 min read at arxiv.orgIn this paper, we introduce OT-PCA, a novel approach for conducting Plaintext-Checking (PC) oracle based side-channel attacks, specifically designed for Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC). By calling the publicly accessible HQC decoder, we build offline templates that enable efficient extraction of soft information for hundreds of secret positions with just a single PC oracle call.
By Haiyue Dong · arxiv.org
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