Impact of Fault Attacks on Post-Quantum Cryptographic Systems

Cryptography is one of the most important tools nowadays. We use it in order to provide as much secrecy as possible and as much advanced as the growth of technologies. With the progress achieved in the domain of quantum computers, scientists started thinking about the so called “post-quantum cryptography”. The thesis is focused on how a post-quantum cryptographic implementation reacts to Fault Attacks; particularly, for this project, we considered the Niederreiter cryptosystem, a variant of the McEliece one (the first proposed public-key cryprosystem), that uses a parity check matrix (H) instead of a generator matrix. It has quite large public keys to achieve 128-bit post-quantum security and the private key is generated using binary Goppa codes \emph{G} that can correct up to \emph{t} errors [2]. The Niederreiter cryptosystem, with the right choice of parameters is considered, until now, to be secure against attacks using quantum computers. This thesis project focuses on the ASIC implementation of the above mentioned cryptosystem and, on this basis, how it reacts to fault attacks. The latter circumvent the protection by injecting faults into the hardware implementation of the cryptographic function, thus manipulating the calculation in a controlled manner and allowing the attacker to derive protected data such as secret keys.