A Side-Channel Attack Against the Secret Permutation on an Embedded McEliece Cryptosystem
Abstract
—In this paper, based on a thorough analysis of the state of the art, we point out a missing solution for embedded devices to secure the syndrome computation. We show that this weakness can open the door to a side-channel attack targeting the secret permutation. Indeed, brute-force attack iterations are dramatically decreased when the secret permutation is recovered. We demonstrate the feasibility of this attack against the McEliece cryptosystem implemented on an ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor using Goppa codes. We explain how to recover the secret permutation on a toy example. Finally, we propose a promising countermeasure, which can be implemented in embedded devices to prevent this attack.
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