On recovering block cipher secret keys in the cold boot attack setting [article]

Gustavo Banegas, Ricardo Villanueva-Polanco
2022 arXiv   pre-print
This paper presents a general strategy to recover a block cipher secret key in the cold boot attack setting. More precisely, we propose a key-recovery method that combines key enumeration algorithms and Grover's quantum algorithm to recover a block cipher secret key after an attacker has procured a noisy version of it via a cold boot attack. We also show how to implement the quantum component of our algorithm for several block ciphers such as AES, PRESENT and GIFT, and LowMC. Additionally,
more » ... evaluating the third-round post-quantum candidates of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) post-quantum standardization process against different attack vectors is of great importance for their overall assessment, we show the feasibility of performing our hybrid attack on Picnic, a post-quantum signature algorithm being an alternate candidate in the NIST post-quantum standardization competition. According to our results, our method may recover the Picnic private key for all Picnic parameter sets, tolerating up to 40% of noise for some of the parameter sets. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis of our method by giving the cost of its resources, its running time, and its success rate for various enumerations.
arXiv:2205.04220v1 fatcat:msrqj73iyjcifhfmhr2m2hxbuy